Alan Turing sidestepped 'can machines think?' with a game about pretending to be human

In 1950, Turing proposed judging machine intelligence not by asking what a machine 'really' is, but by whether a human judge, chatting blind, can reliably tell it apart from a person. He called it the 'imitation game'. Over 70 years later, it's still the reference point every claim of AI intelligence gets measured against — and argued over.

— Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence — Mind, 1950