The study of artificial intelligence has been of particular interest to psychologists for many years. Not only can an intelligent machine be used to complete tasks that could normally only be done by humans, machined can test ideas about the functions of human intelligence. An article by Turing (1950) described a way of answering the important question "Can machines think?". This idea is called "The Turing Test" and is based on The Imitation Game.
Turing's main statement in this article is that the functions of the human brain must be computable. He puts forward ideas about how machine intelligence can be achieved.
The Imitation Game involves three people: a man, a woman and an interrogator who can be of either sex. The interrogator is in a different room to the man and woman and asks them questions by teletype in order to try and determine which one is the woman. The man tries to pretend that he is the woman and the woman has to convince the interrogator that it is actually she. If the man is successful in pretending to be the woman, we would expect that the interrogator would decide correctly on no more than 50% of trials. Turing developed this imitation game and suggested it be conducted with a machine to replace the man to see if the interrogator determines wrongly as often as when played with a man and woman. The judge has to determine which is the computer and which is the human by asking each of them questions. This is known as the Turing Test.
Turing claims that passing his test only suffices for being intelligent. His test is very hard and there may be some intelligent machines which aren't intelligent enough to pass the Turing Test. Turing acknowledges this; he doesn't to say that being able to pass his test is a necessary condition for being intelligent. He's only saying that the machines which are able to pass his test are intelligent. .
One of the first computer programs was called "Eliza" (Weizenbaum, 1976 [3]).