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For many, these have been vital considerations for the future of artificial intelligence. But British computer scientist Alan Turing decided to disregard all these questions. In favor of a much simpler one: can a computer talk like a human? This question led to an idea for measuring artificial intelligence that would famously come to be known as the Turing test. In the 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Turing proposed the following game. A human judge has a text conversation with unseen players and evaluates their responses. To pass the test, a computer must be able to replace one of the players without substantially changing the results. In other words, a computer would be considered intelligent if its conversation couldn’t be easily distinguished from a human’s. Turing predicted that by the year 2000, machines with 100 megabytes of memory would be able to easily pass his test. But he may have jumped the gun.