The limits to computing are the limits to your imagination. Yet when computers first made their debut, the general public was taken back by its capabilities when it came to mathematics and computing. People started to ask ‘Are machines really intelligent?”

Fed up with this question and disbelief in computing, one of the first serious thinkers of AI, Alan Turing, decided to create a machine to get the public to stop asking if computers are intelligent or not. This was called the Turing test.

While using this machine during a Turing test, a person would type out a question on a computer, and either a human or machine would answer back. If a machine could fool the user into thinking there was a human on the other side of the screen, Turing wanted those users to accept that the machine was doing something intelligent. Although now there are Turing test competitions worldwide, Alan Turing never expected anyone to actually take this test or use this technology.

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About Michael Wooldridge:

Michael Wooldridge is a professor of Computer Science and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. Since earning his Ph.D. in AI, he has published more than 350 scientific articles on the subject. Mike has been at the heart of the AI community for a quarter of a century and knows most of the key figures in the international AI community. He has been president of the International Association for AI since 2015 and is a fellow of the American Association for AI. He has a long track record of public speaking and science communication on AI matters and related topics.

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