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Welcome to turingtestopera.com, home of the opera The Turing Test by Scottish composer Julian Wagstaff.

This hour-long chamber opera for 6 voices and 12 musicians received its first performance on 15th August 2007 as part of a five-night sell-out run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, performed by Edinburgh Studio Opera.

The work is in one act and takes its name from the test proposed by the English mathematician Alan Turing for human-level intelligence in a computer. Essentially, Turing suggested that if you couldn't tell a computer and a human apart when chatting to them via a keyboard, then the computer had passed the test and could be said to be intelligent.

The opera tells the story of two rival scientists locked in a battle to be first to build a truly intelligent machine - a machine that can pass the Turing test.

Please feel free to browse this site for sound clips, video clips and press cuttings. For all enquiries relating to the opera, including those relating to performing rights, please contact the composer directly.