  In the wake of the latest trends of artificial intelligence (AI), there has
been a resurgence of claims and questions about the Turing test and its value,
which are reminiscent of decades of practical "Turing" tests. If AI were
quantum physics, by now several "Schr\"odinger's" cats would have been killed.
It is time for a historical reconstruction of Turing's beautiful thought
experiment. This paper presents a wealth of evidence, including new archival
sources, and gives original answers to several open questions about Turing's
1950 paper, including its relation with early AI.
