How Alan Turing answered what is thinking?

 Alan Turing Father of Computer Science said because "thinking" is difficult to define, Turing chooses to "replace the question by another  ''Can machines think?'"

One hundred years after Alan Turing was born, his eponymous test remains an elusive benchmark for artificial intelligence. Now, for the first time in decades, it’s possible to imagine a machine making the grade.
Turing was one of the 20th century’s great mathematicians, a conceptual architect of modern computing whose codebreaking played a decisive part in World War II. His test, described in a seminal dawn-of-the-computer-age paper, was deceptively simple: If a machine could pass for human in conversation, the machine could be considered intelligent.

THE IMITATION GAME

Turing’s aim is to provide a method to assess whether or not a machine can think.

He states at the beginning of his paper that the question "Can machines think?" is

a highly ambiguous one. He attempts to transform this into a more concrete form

TURING TEST: 50 YEARS LATER

The Imitation Game: Stage 1.

by proposing what is called the Imitation Game (IG). The game is played with a

man (A), a woman (B) and an interrogator (C) whose gender is unimportant. The

interrogator stays in a room apart from A and B. The objective of the interrogator

is to determine which of the other two is the woman while the objective of both the

man and the woman is to convince the interrogator that he/she is the woman and

the other is not. This situation is depicted in Figure 1.

The means through which the decision, the convincing, and the deception are to

take place is a teletype connection. Thus, the interrogator asks questions in written

natural language and receives answers in written natural language. Questions can

be on any subject imaginable, from mathematics to poetry, from the weather to

chess

According to Turing, the new agenda to be discussed, instead of the equivocal

"Can machines think?", can be ‘What will happen when a machine takes the part

of A in this game? Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is

played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?’

Figure 2 depicts the new situation.

Artificial intelligences are now ubiquitous, from GPS navigation systems and Google algorithms to automated customer service and Apple’s Siri, to say nothing of Deep Blue and Watson — but no machine has met Turing’s standard. The quest to do so, however, and the lines of research inspired by the general challenge of modeling human thought, have profoundly influenced both computer and cognitive science.
There is reason to believe that code kernels for the first Turing-intelligent machine have already been written.

“Two revolutionary advances in information technology may bring the Turing test out of retirement,” wrote Robert French, a cognitive scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, in an Apr. 12 Science essay. “The first is the ready availability of vast amounts of raw data — from video feeds to complete sound environments, and from casual conversations to technical documents on every conceivable subject. The second is the advent of sophisticated techniques for collecting, organizing, and processing this rich collection of data.”

The human mind was thought to be logical. Computers run logical commands. Therefore our brains should be computable. Computer scientists thought that within a decade, maybe two, a person engaged in dialogue with two hidden conversants, one computer and one human, would be unable to reliably tell them apart.
That simplistic idea proved ill-founded. Cognition is far more complicated than mid-20th century computer scientists or psychologists had imagined, and logic was woefully insufficient in describing our thoughts. Appearing human turned out to be an insurmountably difficult task, drawing on previously unappreciated human abilities to integrate disparate pieces of information in a fast-changing environment.
                                                    Alan Mathison Turing
 Born 23 June 1912 London, England, United Kingdom up-to 7 June 1954 (aged 41)Wilmslow, Cheshire, England, United Kingdom 
                                                    B.S in Mathematics King's College, Cambridge 
                                                    M.S in Mathematics Princeton University 
                                                    PhD under Alonzo Church  at  Princeton University
@ErickMc