30 years before Searle's Chinese Room, Alan Turing posed the question, can machines think? in one of his more famous papers. Being the practical genius he was, he decided not to tackle that question head on, but to instead pose it in the framework of the problem of other minds. This problem asks, how do we truly know that other people have minds like our own? Since we can only observe their behavior—and not the inner workings of their mind—we must take it on faith that they are like us. Turing proposed that if a machine could behave as if it were intelligent, then we should view it as such. This, in a nutshell, is the Turing Test. Passing the test means convincing humans that a machine is a fellow human.

You might be wondering at this point, has a program ever successfully passed the Turing Test? And the answer is that there really is no official Turing Test. The closest thing to an official test is the Loebner Prize. This is a contest held yearly that awards modest prizes to those chatbots that appear the most convincingly human to a panel of judges. If this sounds rigorous and academic, it has been described as anything but. Loebner himself is said to be quite the character, frequently professing his love of wine, marijuana, and prostitutes. His sponsorship for the contest is said to have been a product of his total distain for labor of any kind.

Hopefully, by this point, you'll have realized that any claims about passing the Turing Test are more spectacle than actual science. Despite this, Turing's original concept is a useful construct.