The Quest for the Thinking Computer

Abstract

The first large-scale implementation of the Turing Test was set in motion in 1985, with the first contest taking place in 1991. US100,000 in prize money was offered to the developers of a computer program that could fool people into thinking it was a person. The initial contest, which allowed programs to focus on a specific topic, was planned and designed by a committee of distinguished philosophers and computer scientists and drew worldwide attention. The results of the contest showed that although conversational computer programs are still quite primitive, distinguishing a person from a computer when only brief conversations are permitted can be challenging. When the contest judges ranked the eight computer terminals in the event from most to least human, no computer program was ranked as human as any of the humans in the contest; however, the highest-ranked computer program was misclassified as a human by five of the ten judges, and two other programs were also sometimes misclassified. Also of note, one human was mistakenly identified as a computer by three of the ten judges.