What was Alan Turing's imitation game?

I hate it when people criticize the Turing test as imprecise or unproductive. While it may be not be an important benchmark in serious AI research, it's been incredibly thought provoking and inspiring for over half a century. Many great scientists give us value beyond their publications in journals, essays, and dreams that help to put the bigger picture into perspective.

Also I'm glad the movie came out so it's easier to explain to my family about one of my personal heros.

I don't think it is surprising at all that Turing took the possibility of telepathy seriously. Many scientists and educated people took the possibility seriously in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. This is reflected in the many research projects conducted at the time in academia and government (most infamously, the MKULTRA CIA program).

You can see this belief represented in the "hard" science fiction published at the time, much of which treated telepathy and other ESP subjects seriously--including Bester's The Demolished Man, Asimov's Foundation series, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Clarke's Childhood's End, and Niven's Known Space series.

There was a real and broadly shared sense, for several decades, that psychology and ESP might be the area of the next fundamental scientific breakthrough.

It was not until the 1980s that it became clear ESP was a dead-end, and today it's mostly mocked by the scientific community as a source of scams. But to apply today's mindset to Turing's 1950 paper is a pretty substantial hindsight error.

Very interesting read. If anyone is interested in chatbots or conversational AI, I'm working on the space (in the open) superscriptjs.com