Turing Test: What is it – and why isn't it the definitive word in

The news that the Turing Test has been beaten by a computer for the first time could have significant implications for artificial intelligence – but just what is the Turing test and what does beating it actually mean? The test was first proposed by the British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing who, in his 1950 paper'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', asked a simple question: 'Can machines think?' Turing later finessed this to'can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?' and proposed his eponymous test as one way of finding out. In its most simple form the test has a human interrogator speaking to a number of computers and humans through an interface. If the interrogator cannot distinguish between the computers and the humans then the Turing Test has been passed. There are many different takes on the test (in some variations the interrogator knows that one of the entities they are questioning is a computer – in others they don't) but many computer scientists and philosophers have criticized its very premises for only assessing the appearance of intelligence.