---
title: Ada Lovelace and the Turing Test
description: In Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing describes the famous
  Turing test for detecting machine intelligence. Did you know that Turing’s thesis
  was heavily influenced by Ada Lovelace’s critique of Babbage’s Analytical Engine,
  wherein she states that “the Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything,”
  arguing that […]
url: https://canonical.com/blog/ada-lovelace-and-the-turing-test
---

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2. Article

---

[Canonical](https://canonical.com/blog/author/canonical "More about Canonical")

24 March 2010

# Ada Lovelace and the Turing Test

[Design](https://canonical.com/blog/tag/design)

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In *Computing Machinery and Intelligence*, Alan Turing describes the famous Turing test for detecting machine intelligence. Did you know that Turing’s thesis was heavily influenced by Ada Lovelace’s critique of Babbage’s Analytical Engine, wherein she states that “the Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything,” arguing that computing machines do not exhibit creativity? You can read more about Lovelace’s critique of the possibility of machine creativity, and how this critique informed Turing’s work on machine intelligence in my paper, [*Computing Machinery and Creativity*](http://davidsiegel.org/computing-machinery-and-creativity/).

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

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