Turing's imitation game, also commonly known as the Turing test, is undoubtedly a key component in any study of artificial intelligence or computer science. But it is much more than this as it also provides insight into how humans communicate, our unconscious biases and prejudices, and even our gullibility. The imitation game helps us to understand why we make assumptions, which often turn out to be incorrect, about someone (or something) with whom we are communicating and perhaps it helps to shed light on why we sometimes make seemingly irrational conclusions about them.

In the chapters ahead we'll look at the game in much more detail; however in essence it involves a direct conversational comparison between a human and a machine. Basically, the goal of the machine is to make you believe that it is in fact the human taking part, whereas the human involved is merely being themselves. Both the human and the machine are hidden, so cannot be seen or heard. The conversation is purely textual with slang, idiom, spelling mistakes, poor grammar and factual errors all being part of the mix.

If you put yourself in the role of an interrogator in the parallel test then it is your job to converse with both a hidden human and a hidden machine at the same time and, after a five-minute period as stipulated by Alan Turing himself, to decide which hidden entity is which. If you make the right identification then that's a point against the machine whereas if you make a mistake or you simply don't know which is which then that's a point for the machine. If a machine is successful in fooling enough average interrogators (one interpretation of Turing's 1950 work is 30%), then it can be said to have passed the Turing test.

Actually restricting the topic to a specific subject area makes it somewhat easier for the machine, because it can direct the interrogation to its knowledgebase. However, Turing advocated that the machine be investigated for its intellectual capacity. Thus we should not restrict the topic of conversation at all, which we believe is an appropriate challenge for machines of today, and which is much more interesting for the interrogator and is in the spirit of the game as (we feel) Turing intended.