The recent movie The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, brought the work of Alan Turing to a much wider audience than was previously the case.
The movie has an interesting scene where Alan discusses the concept of an intelligent machine with the policeman who arrested him. He asks if you would consider a machine to be intelligent if a human couldn’t tell the difference between it and another human when conversing with it.
He published this idea in a paper in 1950 and he called the scenario The Imitation Game. Later this became known as the Turing Test.
Every year, a competition is held to test real world Artificial Intelligence algorithms to see if they can pass the Turing Test. This competition is called the Loebner Prize. Since the competition started in 1991, no algorithm has managed to pass the test.
This year, the competition will be held at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing worked on breaking the German Enigma Code. The deadline for applications is 1st July 2015 and the final will be held on 19th September.
You can read Turing’s original paper proposing the test here:
Computing Machinery And Intelligence by A.M.Turing
The details of the Loebner Prize are here:
On Machine Intelligence 