Observer review: Living Dolls by Gaby Wood

Just over half-a-century ago, the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing, fresh from his secretive triumphs at Bletchley Park and the breaking of the Enigma Code, wrote a now famous essay speculating on the possibility of machine intelligence. Turing imagined what he called an'imitation game'. A judge communicating by some kind of remote message system with two players would have to guess which of them was human. In the now familiar version of the imitation game, one player would be human, the other a machine. A machine would be intelligent if it could con the judge.