This was done by having one person chat via a computer terminal where they would sometimes communicate with another human, and sometimes communicate with a computer – could the computer convincingly imitate a human?īritish mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing’s “Turing Test” attempted to see if a computer can exhibit behaviour indistinguishable from a human The “Turing Test” attempted to see if a computer can exhibit behaviour indistinguishable from a human. The concept of machine intelligence was the focus of much of Turing’s work through the late 1940s, and in 1950 he proposed a way to measure this.

The research that Turing went on to do after the war also has a profound legacy, the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence both stem from the work of the logician. Alan Turing became a household name after 2014's film The Imitation Game which detailed the crucial role that the British mathematician played in decoding the German Enigma cipher during the second World War, which brought the conflict to a quicker end and saved countless lives.

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