Can machines think? The controversy that led to the Turing test, 1946-1950

Turing’s much debated test has turned 70 and is still fairly controversial. His 1950 paper is seen as a complex and multi-layered text and key questions remain largely unanswered. Why did Turing choose learning from experience as best approach to achieve machine intelligence? Why did he spend several years working with chess-playing as a task to illustrate and test for machine intelligence only to trade it off for conversational question-answering later in 1950? Why did Turing refer to gender imitation in a test for machine intelligence? In this article I shall address these questions directly by unveiling social, historical and epistemological roots of the so-called Turing test. I will draw attention to a historical fact that has been scarcely observed in the secondary literature so far, namely, that Turing's 1950 test came out of a controversy over the cognitive capabilities of digital computers, most notably with physicist and computer pioneer Douglas Hartree, chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, and neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson. Seen from its historical context, Turing’s 1950 paper can be understood as essentially a reply to a series of challenges posed to him by these thinkers against his view that machines can think