The Turing Test and our shifting conceptions of intelligence.

"Can machines think?" So asked Alan Turing in his 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Turing quickly noted that, given the difficulty of defining thinking , the question is "too meaningless to deserve discussion." As is often done in philosophical debates, he proposed replacing it with a different question. Turing imagined an "imitation game," in which a human judge converses with both a computer and a human (a "foil"), each of which vies to convince the judge that they are the human. Importantly, the computer, foil, and judge do not see one another; they communicate entirely through text. After conversing with each candidate, the judge guesses which one is the real human. Turing's new question was, "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?"