In 1950 Alan Turing devised a thought experiment that has since been revered as the ultimate test of machine intelligence. He called it the “imitation game,” but most people know it as the Turing test. Anticipating what we now call chat bots—computer programs that masquerade as humans—Turing envisioned a contest in which a machine tries to trick an interrogator into believing it is human, answering questions about poetry and deliberately making mistakes about arithmetic.
