Computer-Human Conversation Closer to Reality

How will we know when we've built the first intelligent machine—a computer capable of thought? It will pass the Turing Test. In 1950, British mathematician Alan Turing—later revealed as one of his country's chief code breakers during the Second World War—wrote an article called "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" for Mind, a small Oxford University philosophy journal. The article described what would soon become the definitive method for identifying an intelligent computer. Turing suggested that if a machine and a person carry on a conversation—via e-mail, say—without the person realizing that the other participant is a machine, then the machine can be deemed to think.

1. Turing Test - The Turing test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.

2. Alan Turing - Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist.