He begins by describing a scenario where a man and a woman would both try to convince the remote, unseen interrogator that they are female, using type-written responses or by speaking through an intermediary. It’s right there in the second paragraph of Turing’s landmark 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” published in 1950 in the journal Mind. MacDorman isn’t splitting hairs with this analysis. In this competition, the computer was pretending to be a 13-year-old boy, not a woman, and it was in a competition against itself, not a man.” “Turing proposed an imitation game in which a man and a computer compete in pretending to be a woman.

“Turing never proposed a test in which a computer pretends to be human,” says Karl MacDorman, an associate professor of human-computer interaction at Indiana University.

They aren’t the first-Cleverbot was considered by some to have passed in 2011-but as of right now, they’re the most famous. Instead of passing the Turing Test, the researchers gamed it. In a two-part deception, Eugene’s broken English could be explained away by not being a native speaker, and its general stupidity could be justified by its being a kid (no offense, 13-year-olds). And it used possibly the dirtiest trick of all. Like every chatbot before it, Eugene evaded questions, rather than processing their content and returning a truly relevant answer.

Instead, the researchers who built the winning program, “Eugene Goostman,” engaged in outright trickery. Turing imagined a benchmark that would answer the question, “Can machines think,” with a resounding yes, demonstrating some level of human-like cognition. You may have also heard that this was a complete sham, and the academic equivalent of urinating directly on Turing’s grave. This prompted the University of Reading, which had organized the competition, to announce the acheivment of “an historic milestone in artificial intelligence.” In a contest held this past weekend, a chatbot posing as a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy fooled a third of its human judges into thinking it was a human.

By now, you may have heard that the Turing Test, that hallowed old test of machine intelligence proposed by pioneering mathematician Alan Turing in 1950, has been passed.

Download the imitation game test