The imitation game is the test Alan Turing proposed in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", in which an interrogator judges whether a computer can take a player's place in a written question game. It is now known as the Turing test.
The more I thought about it and started writing the script, the more I was like, “Oh, isn't it weird that since the beginning—since the imitation game—this idea of a conversation between two entities has really been at the heart of the research field that is AI?”
Lawrence Lek, Lawrence Lek on AI Reinventing Place