In October 1950 Alan Turing published “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in the philosophy journal Mind (volume LIX, issue 236, pages 433 to 460). It is one of the most influential papers in the history of computing.
Rather than argue about the slippery question of whether machines can “think,” Turing proposed to replace it with a practical test he called the imitation game, now widely known as the Turing Test. In it, a human interrogator exchanges typed messages with both a person and a machine and tries to tell which is which. If the machine cannot be reliably distinguished from the human, Turing argued, there is no useful sense in which it fails to think.
The paper also anticipated and answered many objections to machine intelligence that are still debated today, and it framed learning machines as a path toward building intelligent systems. It set the intellectual agenda for the field of artificial intelligence that would be named formally a few years later at Dartmouth.