"Can machines think?" That's the core question legendary mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing posed in October, 1950. Turing wanted to assess whether machines could imitate or exhibit ...

Author's rendition of a basic Turing test set-up. Sitting in between two agents (one human and one machine), a person needs to interact with both agents and determine (correctly) which is a machine.

Turing is best known for his development of the Bombe, a machine that successfully deciphered coded Nazi messages during World War II. The Germans encoded their messages using Enigma machines, which ...