Turing test

noun

: a test to establish the existence of artificial intelligence in which questions from an interrogator are answered by an unseen person and computer with the understanding that if the interrogator is unable to correctly identify which responder is human the computer has demonstrated thinking ability comparable to a human's

… for decades, the standard test for whether technology was approaching intelligence was the Turing test …

—Navneet Alang

Examples of Turing test in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

The term captcha—Completely Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart—was coined by researchers in 2000 and presented as a way to protect websites from malicious, nonhuman users. —Reece Rogers, Wired News, 3 Nov. 2025

Engineering follows the simple black-box criterion of the Turing test. —Caroline A. Jones, Artforum, 1 Nov. 2025

Author Brian Christian explored this irony in his 2011 book The Most Human Human, which chronicled his experience competing against chatbots in Turing tests. —Deni Ellis Béchard, Scientific American, 22 Oct. 2025

But the goal for conversational AI as a product and for research that will power that product is effectively passing the Turing test for a conversation with an AI agent. —Tharin Pillay, Time, 15 Oct. 2025

Word History

Etymology

after Alan M. turing, who proposed the test

First Known Use

1956, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for Turing test

• acquiesced
• coalesced
• dispossessed
• manifest
• overdressed
• overstressed
• prepossessed
• reassessed
• reinvest
• repossessed
• unaddressed
• uncompressed