Only in the last half century have we had
computational devices and programming languages
powerful enough to build experimental
tests of ideas about what intelligence is. Turing’s
1950 seminal paper in the philosophy
journal Mind is a major turning point in the
history of AI. The paper crystallizes ideas about
the possibility of programming an electronic
computer to behave intelligently, including a
description of the landmark imitation game
that we know as Turing’s Test. Vannevar Bush’s
1945 paper in the Atlantic Monthly lays out a
prescient vision of possibilities, but Turing was
actually writing programs for a computer—for
example, to play chess, as laid out in Claude Elwood
Shannon’s 1950 proposal.