Turing Publishes "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"

Alan Turing publishes "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in the journal Mind (Vol. 59, No. 236, pp. 433-460), opening with the question "Can machines think?" and proposing the "imitation game" — now known as the Turing Test — as an operational criterion for machine intelligence. Working at the University of Manchester's Computing Machine Laboratory alongside the Manchester Mark 1, Turing systematically dismantles nine objections to machine thought, from theological to mathematical (Goedel's incompleteness), and predicts that by 2000 machines with ~10^9 bits of storage could fool an average interrogator 30% of the time in 5 minutes of questioning. He introduces the concept of machine learning by proposing that rather than programming adult intelligence directly, one might simulate a child's mind and educate it. The paper establishes the philosophical and conceptual framework that makes AI credible as a research program, directly shaping the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop's founding premise that "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it."