As something of a (biased) expert: yes, it’s a big deal, and yes, this seemingly dumb breakthrough was the last missing piece. It takes a few dozen hours of philosophy to show why your brain is also composed of recursive structures of probabilistic machines, so forget that, it’s not neccesary, instead, take a glance at these two links:
> Alan Turing on why we should never ever perform a Turing test
Can you cite specifically what in the paper you're basing that on? I skimmed it as well as the Wikipedia summary but I didn't see anywhere that Turing said that the imitation game should not be played.
I was definitely being a bit facetious for emphasis, but he says a few times that the original question — “Can machines think?” - is meaningless, and the imitation game question is solved in its very posing. As a computer scientist he was of course worried about theoretical limits, and he intended the game in that vein. In that context he sees the answer as trivial: yes, a good enough computer will be able to mimic human behavior.
The essay’s structure is as follows:
1. Propose theoretical question about computer behavior.
2. Describe computers as formal automata.
3. Assert that automata are obviously general enough to satisfy the theoretical question — with good enough programming and enough power.
4. Dismiss objections, of which “humans might be telepathic” was somewhat absurdly the only one left standing.
It’s not a very clearly organized paper IMO, and the fun description of the game leads people to think he’s proposing that. That’s just the premise, and the pressing conclusion he derives from it is simple: spending energy on this question is meaningless, because it’s either intractable or solved depending on your approach (logical and empirical, respectively).
TL;DR: the whole essay revolves around this quote, judge for yourself:
We may now consider the ground to have been cleared and we are ready to proceed to the debate on our question, "Can machines think?" and the variant of it quoted at the end of the last section… ["Are there discrete-state machines which would do in the Imitation Game?"]
It will simplify matters for the reader if I explain first my own beliefs in the matter.
Consider first the more accurate form of the question. I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.
The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
1. Alan Turing on why we should never ever perform a Turing test: https://redirect.cs.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf
2. Marvin Minsky on the “Frame Problem” that lead to one or two previous AI winters, and what an Intuitive algorithm might look like: https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article...