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In his famous 1950 paper titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing explored the question, “Can machines think?”

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In this paper he describes an “imitation game” which involves a human interrogator, another human and a digital computer.

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The interrogator is placed in a separate room and exchanges messages with the computer and the other human to determine which is which.

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Turing suggested that if the interrogator could not reliably identify which was the computer, “one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”

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In his paper, Turing presents arguments refuting several objections that might be raised about whether machines could think, including the “Lady Lovelace objection” cited above.

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This imitation game has since become known as the Turing Test, and Turing himself predicted that computers would pass the test by the year 2000.

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In recent years, computers have triumphed against opponents in several different spheres.

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For instance, in a highly publicized 1997 chess match, an IBM computer called Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Gary Kasparov.

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Deep Blue used custom hardware to compute chess moves using a brute-force approach, analyzing hundreds of millions of chess moves per second.

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Later, in 2006, Russian chess grand-master Vladimir Kramnik lost in a six-game match against a chess program called Deep Fritz, which ran on personal computer hardware.

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In 2011, another IBM computer named Watson competed on the quiz show Jeopardy and defeated the all-time biggest human winner of the show.

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At the time of writing, the Turing Test has yet to be reliably won by a computer, but many clever “chatbot” programs have been written to simulate intelligent conversation.