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Why did Alan Turing design the Turing Test?
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history of artificial intelligence (AI)
British mathematician Alan Turing, c. 1930s. Turing did the earliest work on AI, and he introduced many of the central concepts of AI in a report entitled “Intelligent Machinery” (1948).
Alan Turing designed the Turing Test in 1950 as a practical way to determine if a computer could exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from a human's. He proposed an "imitation game" where a human interrogator tries to differentiate between a computer and a human through text-based questions. If the interrogator cannot reliably identify the computer, it is considered to have demonstrated thinking ability comparable to a human's. Turing's goal was to sidestep the philosophical debate on defining "thinking" by focusing on observable behavior.1234