The Turing Test: Can a Machine Think?

A simulated mind is a mind because they are both abstract things. This is quite different to, let's say, simulating a bullet in a computer game. In that case, the simulation would be that thing. And David writes, in 1950, he, Turing, famously addressed the question, can a machine think? Not only did he defend the proposition that it can on the grounds of universality, he also proposed a test for whether a program had achieved it. Now known as the Turing test, it is simply that a suitable human judge will be unable to tell whether a program is human or not.