Turing did not provide definitions of machines and thinking, he just avoided
semantic arguments by inventing a game, the Turing imitation game. Instead
of asking, ‘Can machines think?’, Turing said we should ask, ‘Can machines pass
a behaviour test for intelligence?’ He predicted that by the year 2000, a computer
could be programmed to have a conversation with a human interrogator for five
minutes and would have a 30 per cent chance of deceiving the interrogator that
it was a human. Turing defined the intelligent behaviour of a computer as the
ability to achieve the human-level performance in cognitive tasks. In other words,
a computer passes the test if interrogators cannot distinguish the
machine from a human on the basis of the answers to their questions.