Turing suggested a test, which is well known as Turing Test, for testing whether a product has intelligence. An outline of the Turing test is given below. For the purpose of the test, there are three rooms. In one of the rooms is a computer system claimed to have imbibed intelligence. In the other two rooms, two persons are sitting, one in each room. The role of one of the persons, let us call A, is to put questions to the computer and to the other person to be called B, without knowing to whom a particular question is being directed, and, of course, with the specific purpose of identifying the computer. On the other hand, the computer would answer in such a way that its identity is not revealed to A. The communication among the three is only through computer terminals so that identity of the computer or the person B can be known only on the basis of quality of responses as intelligent or otherwise, and not just on the basis of other human or machine characteristics. If A is not able to know the identity of the computer, then computer is intelligent. More appropriately, if the computer is able to conceal its identity from A, then the computer is intelligent. We may note here that, in order to be called intelligent, the computer should be clever enough not to give answer too quickly, at least not within a fraction of a second, even if it can, say, to a question involving finding of the product of two numbers each of more than 20 digits.

Objections to Turing Test: There have been a number of objections to the Turing test as a test of intelligence of a machine. One of the most well known objections is called Chinese Room Test proposed by John Searle. The essence of the Chinese Room Test, that we are going to explain below, is that convincing successfully by a system, say A , of possessing qualities of another system, say B, does not imply that the system A actually possesses the qualities of B. For example, the capability of convincing others by a male human of being a woman, does not give the male the quality of bearing a child like a woman.