Turing test

British  

noun

1. a proposed test of a computer's ability to think, requiring that the covert substitution of the computer for one of the participants in a keyboard and screen dialogue should be undetectable by the remaining human participant

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Turing test Cultural  

1. A test proposed by British mathematician Alan Turing, and often taken as a test of whether a computer has humanlike intelligence. If a panel of human beings conversing with an unknown entity (via keyboard, for example) believes that that entity is human, and if the entity is actually a computer, then the computer is said to have passed the Turing test.

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Example Sentences

In the age when the passing of the Turing test was a distant prospect, the question of computing and the mind was one of anthropomorphism—of transmitting human qualities to an object.

From The Wall Street Journal • Nov. 13, 2025

As Spalding University's Lynnell Edwards put it recently: "When did poetry become the new Turing test?"

From Salon • Aug. 29, 2023

Soon after the War, Turing proposed the imitation game - later dubbed the "Turing test" - which seeks to identify whether a machine can behave in a way indistinguishable from a human.

From BBC • Aug. 24, 2023

“People were not building systems for fluent dialogue. That was just too hard,” said Stuart Shieber, a Harvard computer scientist who specializes in computational linguistics, including the Turing test.

From New York Times • Jan. 20, 2023

Alan Turing predicted that someday machines would be able to pass the Turing test, which he called the imitation game.

From Textbooks • Dec. 14, 2022