To determine if a computer has the ability to think, a test was conducted named as

Researchers in artificial intelligence needed a practical way to judge whether a machine's behaviour could be considered intelligent, without having to define "thinking" in an abstract philosophical sense.

The test devised for this purpose is the Turing test, proposed by the mathematician Alan Turing. In it, a human judge holds text conversations with both a human and a machine without knowing which is which; if the judge cannot reliably tell the machine's responses apart from the human's, the machine is said to have passed the test.

"Teletype test" and "interrogator test" are not the recognised names of this experiment, even though a teletype-style interface and an interrogator, the judge, both feature in descriptions of how the test is carried out; the test itself is named after its inventor, not after these incidental elements. "Computation test" is likewise not the established term used in computing or artificial intelligence.

Associate the name directly with its origin: the Turing test is named after Alan Turing, the person who proposed the idea of testing machine intelligence through conversation.