The Legacy of Alan Turing and the Test That Defined AI

Alan Turing’s story is both extraordinary and unfinished. He was a mathematician whose ideas helped end a world war, and a thinker whose theories gave us the blueprint for modern computing. 75 years ago, in 1950, he published “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” and posed the question that still resonates through AI today: “Can machines think?”

That question led to what we now call the Turing Test. Instead of asking what intelligence “is,” Turing asked us to measure what systems can do. If a machine can converse well enough to be mistaken for a person, he argued, then for all practical purposes, it is thinking. It was a shift away from philosophy and toward engineering—and it set the stage for the decades that followed.

Turing’s gift was not only his mathematics but his ability to strip away abstraction. He reminded us to focus on results. Build things that work. Measure what matters. Improve what’s real. That’s a lesson we continue to carry.

His words capture it best. When he wrote, “Instead of trying to produce a program to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s?”, he pointed toward learning systems that grow and adapt over time. It’s uncanny how closely that resembles the way reinforcement learning and generative AI behave today.

He also looked ahead and wrote, “I believe that at the end of the century… one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” More than seventy years later, as large models reason, code, and write with fluency, his foresight feels less like speculation and more like a path we’re walking.

And his most human line—“Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine”—goes to the heart of why we chose his name. At Turing, we see the overlooked and underestimated not as limits but as the source of the next great breakthroughs.

The Turing Test was never meant to be the final word on intelligence. Its power lies in its clarity. Don’t debate consciousness. Test performance. Can a system hold its own in a real conversation? If it can, we’re forced to rethink where the line between man and machine is drawn.

That framing turned AI from an abstract debate into something you could try, test, and build toward. It’s why the Turing Test is still with us. Simple enough to grasp. Challenging enough to keep us striving.

When Jonathan Siddharth and Vijay Krishnan founded Turing, they saw the name as more than a tribute. It was a standard.

• The Turing Award, the highest honor in computer science, sets the level of excellence we aspire to.
• The Turing Test, focused on outcomes rather than theory, mirrors our belief in pairing AI with human expertise to achieve results.
• And Alan Turing himself, whose story reminds us that people once underestimated can change everything.

To us, the name Turing is also a promise: AI isn’t here to erase work. It’s here to help people find it, do it better, and expand what’s possible.

Every time we solve a CAPTCHA, chat with an AI, or embed agents into enterprise systems, we’re living inside the dialogue Alan Turing began.

He didn’t live to see how far his ideas would go, but the legacy remains. It shows up in every engineer chasing excellence, in every conversation between humans and machines, and in every advance that brings us closer to ASI.

For us at Turing, his work is not only history. It’s a foundation for the future—a reminder that intelligence, whether human or machine, is judged not by what it claims but by what it achieves.