Principles for Designing an AI Competition, or Why the Turing Test Fails as an Inducement Prize

If the artificial intelligence research community is to have a challenge problem as an incentive for research, as many have called for, it behooves us to learn the principles of past successful inducement prize competitions. Those principles argue against the Turing test proper as an appropriate task, despite its appropriateness as a criterion (perhaps the only one) for attributing intelligence to a machine. Gary Marcus in The New Yorker asks "What Comes After the Turing Test?" and wants "to update a sixty-four-year-old test for the modern era" (Marcus 2014). Moshe Vardi in his Communications of the ACM article "Would Turing Have Passed the Turing Test?" opines that "It's time to consider the Imitation Game as just a game" (Vardi 2014). The popular media recommends that we "Forget the Turing Test" and replace it with a "better way to measure intelligence" (Locke 2014).