Yet, he never did doubt its potential to achieve: “We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields.” He wrote those words in 1950, when computers were relatively impotent, very large boxes that could do a little bit of math. At that moment, there was little evidence to justify the belief that these machines would ever acquire the capabilities of the human brain. Still, Turing had faith. He imagined a test of the computer’s intelligence in which a person would send written questions to a human and a machine in another room. Receiving two sets of
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