Turing test with a human, both questioned in parallel by an interrogator. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the verbal version generalises naturally to all of human performance capacity, verbal as well as nonverbal (robotic). Turing's original article describes a simple party game involving three players. Player A is a man, player B is a woman and player C (who plays the role of the interrogator) is of either sex. In the imitation game, player C is unable to see either player A or player B, and can communicate with them only through written notes. By
Church–Turing thesis three formally-defined classes of computable functions coincide with the "informal" notion of an effectively calculable function. Since, as an informal notion, the concept of effective calculability does not have a formal definition, the thesis, although it has near-universal acceptance, cannot be formally proven. Since its inception, variations on the original thesis have arisen, including statements about what can physically be realized by a computer in our universe (physical Church-Turing thesis) and what can be efficiently computed (Church–Turing thesis (complexity theory)). These variations are not due to Church or Turing, but arise from later work in complexity theory and digital physics.