When PARRY Met ELIZA: A Ridiculous Chatbot Conversation From 1972

This weekend, to mark the 60th anniversary of Alan Turing's death, a chatbot named Eugene Goostman--a program pretending to be a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy--fooled one of three assembled judges into thinking that he it is human. Whether this marks the first beating of the Turing Test, the pioneering computer scientist's trial for artificial intelligence, remains a matter of debate; for one thing, one of Turing's qualifications was that the human-fooling be done repeatedly. For another thing, though, there have been other programs that have claimed Turing Test passage. And two of them, one time, talked to each other. In 1966, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created a program that seemed to be a contender for Turing Test passage.