Alan Turing, an English mathematician, is considered the father of Computer Science. He graduated in 1934 with a distinguished degree at King's College, Cambridge and in 1935 was elected a fellow at King's for his dissertation on the central limit theorem. He reformulated Kurt Gödel's 1931 results on the limits of proof and computation, replacing Gödel's universal arithmetic-based formal language with what is called Turing machines. He proved that such machine was capable of performing any possible mathematical problem if it were representable as an algorithm, even if no actual Turing machine would be likely to have practical applications. With this model he provided a formal definition of the concept of the algorithm and computation.

After graduating, in June 1938 he obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton; his dissertation introduced the notion of relative computing. After this experience, back to Cambridge he attended lectures by Ludwig Wittgenstein about the foundations of mathematics. During the Second World War, he was a main participant in the efforts at Bletchley Park to break German ciphers. He worked on the problem of the German Enigma machine, and collaborated with Dilly Knox, a senior GCCS codebreaker. On 4 September 1939, the day after the UK declared war on Germany, Turing reported to Bletchley Park. In December 1940, Turing solved the naval Enigma indicator system, which was more mathematically complex than the indicator systems used by the other services.

In 1948 Turing was appointed at the Mathematics Department at Manchester and in 1949 he became director of the computing laboratory. He began working on software for one of the earliest true computers — the Manchester Mark 1. During this time wrote “Computing machinery and intelligence” where he addressed the problem of building intelligent machines. For this purpose ho proposed an experiment now known as the Turing test, an attempt to define a standard for a machine to be called "intelligent". The idea was that a computer could be said to "think" if it could fool an interrogator into thinking that the conversation was with a human. The test would work as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human. All participants are placed in isolated places. If the judge is not able to reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. In order to test the machine's intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen.

Since 1966, the Turing Award has been given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to a person for technical contributions to the computing community. It is widely considered to be the computing world's equivalent to the Nobel Prize. Since its birth in 1956, Artificial Intelligence has made much progress but if we revisit the very simple Turing test we are in front of a reminder of not only how far we've come, but how far we have to go. Intelligent agents and machines are everywhere around and they do many jobs for us, but we shall always remember that humankind is the most complex and extraordinary. Computer scientists continue their struggle to build intelligent machines that can improve our life and do for us many heavy tasks saving time and effort. However, the problem if a computer can fool a human remains unsolved and fascinating. For those interested in this problem, the Loebner Prize provides an annual platform for practical Turing Tests with the first competition held in 1991. Proposed by Hugh Loebner in agreement with The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, it aims to underwrite a contest designed to implement the Turing Test. They pledged a Grand Prize of $100,000 and a Gold Medal (pictured above) for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's. Such a computer can be said "to think." Each year an annual prize of $2000 and a bronze medal is awarded to the most human-like computer. The winner of the annual contest is the best entry relative to other entries that year, irrespective of how good it is in an absolute sense.