Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954) was a British mathematician and logician whose theoretical work laid groundwork for computing and artificial intelligence. He is best known in AI history for his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” published in the journal Mind (Volume LIX, Issue 236, pages 433-460). The Turing Digital Archive at King’s College, Cambridge preserves his letters, papers, and biographical materials.
In that paper Turing opened with the question “Can machines think?” and proposed replacing it with a practical experiment he called the imitation game, now widely known as the Turing test. Rather than defining thought directly, he asked whether a machine could converse well enough to be indistinguishable from a human to an interrogator.
The paper reframed machine intelligence as something that could be observed and tested rather than merely debated, and it set a conceptual target that shaped decades of AI research. It remains one of the most cited starting points for the entire field.