The Turing test was introduce by the English mathematician Alan Turing in 1950 and it's a test of machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. The 1950 paper called Computing Machinery and Inteligence opens withe words: "I propose to consider the question 'Can machines think?'". But "thinking" is difficult to def ine, Alan Turing chose to replace the question with another one, close related to the first, without ambiguousity: "Are there imaginable digital computer which would do well in the imitation game?".
In Alan Turing's original example, a human judge engages a natural language conversation with a human and a machine through a keyboard and a screen (the monitor of a computer). It means that the conversation is limited to only text-only channels. All participants are separated from one another, considered to be in different rooms. The humans behave as himself, but the machine is told to perform indistinguishable from a human being - if the jugde can not realiably tell the machine from the human it is said that the machine passed the test. Alan Turing proposed that, under these conditions, if a judge were less than 50% accurate he is likely to pick either human or computer, that computer is such simulation of a human being that he can be considered intelligent. The Turing test does not check the ability to give correct answers, it checks only how closely the given answers resemble human behaviour and typical human answers.
More, it can be considered that if a computer acts, reacts and interacts like a sentient being that it is sentient.
Lately, the phrase “The Turing Test” is sometimes used more generally (not to the test itself) to refer to some kinds of behavioural tests for the presence of mind or thought or intelligence in putatively minded entities. In some versions, the game has been modified so that there is only one contestant and the judge's job is simply to decide whether the contestant is human or machine.
The progress of the computing performance (from the hardware point of view) and the development of the software algorithms made possible the appearance of the Artificial Intelligences. Some chatbots (pieces of software that are Artificial Intelligence - they learn by chating with people), such Eliza and Alice, have become famous, but none of them is close to mimicking a human in such way it can fool somebody. Every year there is a prize awarded to the chatbot that does best on the Turing test, it's being held (usually) in New York City.
Ray Kurzweil, inventor and futurist, and Mitch Kapor, software pioneer, have bet 10,000 USD against each other on the question of whether an Artificial Intelligence will pass the Turing Test by 2029. Kurzweil believes one will, while Kapor believes none will.
