Seventy-five years ago this month, mathematician Alan Turing published the academic paper that is widely considered to have launched the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The paper, titled Computing Machinery and Intelligence , opened with a deceptively simple question: “Can machines think?”

Today, Turing is perhaps best known through Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of him in the 2014 film, The Imitation Game , which focused on his wartime codebreaking. But it’s the philosophical questions about thinking machines, which he laid out in this paper and distilled into what came to be known as “ The Turing Test ” that still endure as a foundation for how we measure and debate AI today.

In simplest terms, The Turing Test was intended to show that if a machine could convince a

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