The records behind this event
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Person
Alan Turing
The founder of the question: computation, and whether machines can think.
Turing defined computation itself (1936), broke Enigma at Bletchley, and in 1950 posed machine intelligence as an empirical question with his imitation game. Every benchmark on this site descends from that move: replacing 'can it think?' with 'can it do the task?'. Persecuted by the British state for his homosexuality, he died in 1954; the field's highest…
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Concept
The Turing Test
1950's benchmark, quietly passed, and quietly retired.
Turing proposed conversation indistinguishability as a practical stand-in for 'can machines think.' Modern chatbots pass controlled imitation-game studies (a 2025 UCSD preprint reported GPT-4.5-class models judged human more often than humans), yet the milestone landed without ceremony: the field had already moved its goalposts to reasoning benchmarks, and…
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