Artificial intelligence · 1950

Turing test

Turing asks 'Can machines think?' and replaces it with a conversation game.

In Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing proposed the imitation game: if a judge cannot tell a machine from a human by text conversation, the machine should count as thinking. The paper also anticipated learning machines and answered nine objections. It set the benchmark for conversational AI for 70 years.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

ENIAC 1945
Turing machine 1936

What it led to 3

Dartmouth AI workshop 1956
Logic Theorist 1956
ELIZA 1966

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Training compute of notable AI models Source: Epoch AI, Notable AI Models (CC BY 4.0)

Computation per constant dollar, 1850-2006 Latest: 7.3B million units of computer power per 2006 $ (2003) Source: Nordhaus 2007, Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing, J. Econ. Hist. 67(1), Table 6