Alan Turing, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The original question "Can machines think?" is too vague to deserve discussion until 'machine' and 'think' are specified.12 The imitation game replaces vagueness with precision. An interrogator I communicates by teletype with two parties X and Y, one human and one machine; I asks questions, X and Y respond, and after a suitable interval I tries to identify which is which.
If the interrogator cannot reliably identify, the machine has passed the test. The test is behavioral (deliberately operationalist): it sidesteps the metaphysical question of consciousness — which is unanswerable in third- person terms for any subject including other humans — in favor of the empirical question of whether the machine's verbal behavior is indistinguishable from human verbal behavior under interrogation.
The teletype channel is essential: it removes appearance, voice, and other irrelevant cues, and reduces the question to whether the machine can sustain intelligent conversation. The prediction of CMI: by the end of the twentieth century, machines will be able to play the imitation game so well that an interrogator will have less than a 70% chance of correct identification after five minutes of questioning.3
The deeper claim: passing the test is what we mean, in the relevant operational sense, by "thinking." Disagreement with this claim is not disagreement about whether passing-machines exist; it is disagreement about whether passing-the-test is the right criterion.4
Contrary Views on the Main Question We may now consider the ground to have been cleared and we are ready to proceed to the debate on our question, "Can machines think?" and the variant of it quoted at the end of the last section.Computing Machinery and Intelligence, pp. 8–9
The Machines Concerned in the Game The question which we put in 1 will not be quite definite until we have specified what we mean by the word "machine." It is natural that we should wish to permit every kind of engineering technique to be used in our machines.Computing Machinery and Intelligence, p. 3
The Imitation Game I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to…Computing Machinery and Intelligence, p. 1
This is a poor state of affairs, but, to continue the analogy, it is something to know how to write, and to appreciate the fact that most knowledge can be embodied in books.Can Digital Computers Think, pp. 2–3
The imitation-game proposal is one of the founding texts of philosophy of artificial intelligence and remains the reference point for the debate about machine thinking. Searle's Chinese Room (1980) is the major sustained attack; Block's lookup-table objections (1981) press different worries; Dreyfus and Penrose mount further challenges. The defenders include Dennett, Boden, Shieber, and the broader functionalist tradition. Contemporary large language models have reignited the debate: do current LLMs pass the test in Turing's sense, and if so, what does that show? The operationalist core of the imitation game remains the reference frame for the discussion.