The Turing test, as named after Alan Turing, was designed to provide a satisfactory operational definition of intelligence. Turing defined that intelligent behavior as the ability to achieve human-level performance in all cognitive tasks to fool an interrogator. In his ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Turing says the new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the ‘imitation game.’ It is played by a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He or She knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game, he or she says, either ‘X is A and Y is B’ or ‘X is B and Y is A.’ The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B.¹⁰

Thus, C: will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?

Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer to the question. It is A’s object in the game to try to cause C to make the wrong identification. His or her answer might therefore, be ‘my hair is singled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long.’