It tests imitation skills. What makes the test interesting is the point of view that for some kinds of skills, as the imitation gets good enough, it becomes indistinguishable from the thing it seeks to imitate. The simplest example of this is purely abstract things like a song. Any imitation of a song that gets ever closer to the imitated song will eventually become indistinguishable from the imitated song. People like Hofsdtadter touched on this on the timeless G.E.B.
That's what makes the imitation game so interesting. Any ontological debates about what imitation means, implementation details or limitations are orthogonal to this yet this is what most people everywhere even in here obssess about. Missing the forest for the trees. The point is not to ask whether x is intelligence for any x under consideration but to use this as a reference when it comes to thinking about what is intelligence.
Super imitators or super predictors, the name of the game is helping each other get a sense of what intelligence (the one we have) is. On humans, other mammals, insects, etc.
In philosophy of mind, there is the concept of a “zombie”. This is a person who acts just like a real person would in all circumstances, except that they do not have an internal experience of their senses. No “qualia”.
My little engineering brain has always recoiled at any use of these zombies in an argument. In my reckoning the only way a machine could act human in all circumstances would be if it had a rich internal representation of the world, including sensory data, goals, opinions, fears, weaknesses…
The LLMs are getting better at the Turing test, and as they get better I wonder how correct my intuition about zombies is.
If you pretend they have the intelligence of an infant, they can pass the test. For some reason, people always try to use adult human intelligence as a point of reference. Infants are intelligent too.
My take is that are still making too many assumptions about "intelligence" and conflating human intelligence with adult human intelligence with non-human animal intelligence, etc.