Alan Turing Glossary
Alan Turing was a British mathematician whose work helped found theoretical computer science and whose wartime codebreaking work at Bletchley Park contributed materially to the Allied victory. In AI discourse, he is most often invoked through the Turing Test, proposed in 1950 as the imitation game: if a machine’s conversational behaviour cannot be distinguished from a human’s, in what sense should we deny that it thinks?
The Dictionary uses Turing less as a settled answer than as a background reference. Modern language models complicate the old test. They can imitate human language impressively while still failing at memory, agency, groundedness, or responsibility. That is why Approximate Turing Machine is not a claim that an LLM is a classical computer in the ordinary textbook sense. It is a working metaphor for a system that approximates procedures through learned continuation rather than explicit symbolic execution.
Turing remains unavoidable because he framed the question before the machines existed.