About This Lesson
Conscious, human-like machines are so popular in science fiction that it may come as a surprise to learn artificial intelligence researchers aren’t even sure what it means to ask whether a computer will ever think.
In the middle of the last century, British mathematician Alan Turing proposed the following test for determining whether a computer could think. Put the device in a room, he said, connected to the outside world only by a teletype machine. Then have a human experimenter hold a conversation with "whomever" is in the room only by means of typed messages. If the person sending and receiving messages cannot tell whether another human being or a machine is inside the sealed room, the machine passes its "thinking" exam.
This imaginary scenario is called "The Turing Test."
