OK. I concede that this is a pretty geeky story but I have often wondered when a computer program would be written which was sophisticated enough to pass the Turing test. Remember those Replicants in the movie "Blade Runner"?
George's win seems entirely appropriate to me since Alan Turing was British. I first heard about the Turing test in 1982 when I was going through a phase where I was reading anything to do with the concept of artificial intelligence.
From The Turing Test Page:
The Turing Test was introduced by Alan M. Turing (1912-1954) as "the imitation game" in his 1950 article... Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Mind, Vol. 59, No. 236, pp. 433-460). [The] Turing Test is meant to determine if a computer program has intelligence.
In a nutshell, Turing described a game in which there are three players, two humans and a machine (i.e., an artificially intelligent computer program), all hidden from one another's view. One human player is an interrogator of the other and the machine. The other human player and the machine each try to convince the interrogator that he, she, or it is the human and the other is the machine. Essentially it's a way for an AI program to try to fool a person into thinking it might be another person rather than a computer program, and for a person to test an AI program for intelligence. (Intelligence here, for all intents and purposes, is reduced to mean the convincing imitation of a human persona.)
To date, the Loebner Prize gold medal ("for the first computer whose responses [are] indistinguishable from a human's") has yet to be awarded.
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