How does the Turing test assess whether a computer can be considered intelligent?

The Turing test, proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, assesses machine intelligence through a practical, behavioral approach rather than attempting to define "thinking" abstractly.12

In this "imitation game," a human interrogator communicates via text with both a computer and a human foil. The computer attempts to convince the interrogator that it is the human, while the foil assists the interrogator in making the correct identification. If the interrogator cannot reliably distinguish the computer from the human, the computer is considered to possess intelligence.123

Hilary Putnam was a key figure in this discourse, developing "Turing machine functionalism," which posited that the human brain functions like a computer and the mind like a program. However, this view faced significant criticism. Philosophers like John Searle argued via the Chinese room argument that merely manipulating symbols according to syntactic rules—as a computer does—does not constitute genuine understanding or intelligence. Consequently, many experts now view the Turing test as a limited behavioral metric rather than a definitive proof of true cognitive intelligence.4153