Turing Test
Etymology
Named for British mathematician Alan Turing, who proposed it in a 1950 paper as the "imitation game." Turing sidestepped the unanswerable question "can machines think?" by replacing it with a practical one: can a machine imitate a human convincingly in text conversation? The eponym honors a founder of computer science, and the test has shaped debate about machine minds ever since.
noun phrase · /TYOOR-ing TEST/
A proposed test of machine intelligence: can a computer converse well enough to be mistaken for a human?
What it names
The oldest popular benchmark for AI — and, increasingly, a mirror for how easily people can be fooled by fluent imitation.
Example
Modern chatbots can pass a casual Turing test, which says as much about us as about them.
Related idea
The Turing test measures convincing imitation, not genuine understanding — a distinction dramatized by the "Chinese Room" argument, which asks whether behaving intelligently is the same as actually comprehending.