If I Only Had a Brain: How AI 'Thinks'

Machine thinking has been tied to language ever since Alan Turing's seminal 1950 publication "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." This paper described the Turing Test--a measure of whether a machine can think. In the Turing Test, a human engages in a text-based chat with an entity it can't see. If that entity is a computer program and it can make the human believe he's talking to another human, it has passed the test. Iterations of the Turing Test, such as the Loebner Prize, still exist, though it's become clear that just because a program can communicate like a human (complete with typos, an abundance of exclamation points, swear words, and slang) doesn't mean it's actually thinking.