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There are four names that come to mind when thinking about the history of computation. These are Charles Babbage, Lady Lovelace, John von Neumann and Alan Turing. Not only are their names associated with computation but also with Artificial Intelligence because they all speculated about building intelligent machines.
The Turing test was proposed by Alan Turing to assess whether a machine is truly intelligent. The test involves a person communicating with a machine and a human to try and tell which is which. So far no machine has passed the Turing test but there are a few chatbots around that are interesting to talk to and have taken the test.
The Loebner prize for Artificial Intelligence is the first instantiation of the Turing test. In 2010 a chatbot named Suzette won the prize and actually fooled a judge into thinking it was human.
