"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 human-level intelligent behavior, and so he came up with a test called the "imitation game." This later became known as the Turing test, which is commonly used to assess how well a machine can mimic human behavior.
The genesis of Turing's test came from the inherent difficulty in establishing objective criteria that distinguishes original thought from the imitation of it. The challenge is that evidence of original thought could be denied with the argument that a machine was simply programmed to seem intelligent. Essentially, the crux of proving if machines can think is defining what thinking is.
