Alan Turing published Computing Machinery and Intelligence in the journal Mind during 1950. This paper introduced his concept of what is now known as the Turing test to the general public for the first time.
The original Imitation game involved three players: Player A was a man, player B was a woman, and player C played the role of the interrogator. Player C could be of either sex and communicated only through written notes or any other form that did not give away details about gender.
Turing focused on digital machinery which manipulates binary digits of 1 and 0 using simple rules because they already existed in 1950 and are universal. His research proved that a digital computer can simulate the behavior of any other digital machine given enough memory and time.
Turing addressed nine common objections including religious arguments about immortal souls and mathematical limits from Gödel's incompleteness theorem. He also dismissed arguments from continuity in the nervous system noting analog systems can be simulated to reasonable accuracy given enough computing power.
Alan Turing postulated that programming a child mind instead of an adult mind would be more appropriate for creating learning machines. The process involved breaking down into two parts: programming a child mind and its education process with a learning method involving reward and punishment.