Viewed in retrospect, Turing's test for machine intelligence has to rank as one of the most provocative assertions in all of modern science. To this day, people are still talking about it, writing commentaries on it, and voicing outraged objections to it (most of which he anticipated in his original paper, by the way).† Of course, like so much of Turing's work, the 1950 paper wasn't widely read at the time, and it had essentially no impact on the artificial-intelligence research that was just beginning in the United States.
