AI Glossary / Turing test
🧠 Basics
Turing test
The classic test: can you distinguish machine from human in text conversation?
The Turing Test is a thought experiment proposed by Alan Turing in 1950: if a human conducting a text conversation cannot determine whether there's a machine or human on the other side, the machine can be considered "thinking." For decades it was the symbolic horizon of AI research. Modern language models regularly fool people in short conversations, which revealed the test's limitations-fluent conversation turned out to be different from understanding. Today it's treated more as a historical curiosity than a real measure of machine intelligence.