Why No One Has Implemented the Turing Test: Identifying Turing’s Design and Putting it into Practice

Abstract In October 1950, Alan Turing proposed that a machine’s success in an imitation game provides a criterion for thinking. Turing’s test became one of the philosophical foundations of AI, but three-quarters of a century later, it is widely claimed that generative AI models pass the test, rendering it obsolete. Our aim here is to establish definitively Turing’s conceptual design for his game. We argue that influential interpretations of Turing’s design are mistaken, with the consequence that his test has not been passed. We also present the results of carrying out, for the first time, Turing’s experiment as he proposed it.