In his beautiful 2011 book The Most Human Human: What Talking to Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive, Brian Christian shares his experience as a "human confederate" in a quirky contest known as the Loebner Prize. It's inspired by Alan Turing's proposal for how to gauge computer intelligence. In each round of the Loebner event, human judges sit at a computer and carry out text chats with two unseen interlocutors. One is a human and one is a software program--a chatbot. The judges must guess which is which, and the chatbot that most often gets mistaken for a human wins money for its programmer.

Each year, the artificial intelligence community convenes to administer the famous -- and famously controversial -- Turing test, pitting sophisticated software programs against humans to determine if a computer can "think." The machine that most often fools the judges wins the Most Human Computer Award. But there is also a prize, strange and intriguing, for the "Most Human Human." Brian Christian, a young poet with degrees in computer science and philosophy, was chosen to participate in a recent competition. This playful, profound book is not only a testament to his efforts to be deemed more human than a computer, but also a rollicking exploration of what it means to be human in the first place.

Charles Platt reports on the latest battle to determine the most human computer, even as he worries that he may be the least human human. Robert Epstein is giving us all a pep talk. "You must work very hard to convince the judges that you're human," he tells us. "You shouldn't have any trouble doing that – because you are human." This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. He wears Dr. Martens boots, black jeans, a black shirt, a Mickey Mouse tie, and an earring. His longish hair is brushed straight back and flips up over his collar. Five of us are listening to him in a beige conference room on the brand-new campus of California State University at San Marcos, near San Diego. Soon we will be put in front of computer terminals, where we will follow Epstein's instructions and, yes, do our best to seem human. Our purpose is to find out whether 10 judges can tell the difference between humans and artificial-intelligence programs, when they are online at the same time.

According to the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, every psychologist must at some point in his or her career write a sentence of the form: "The human being is the only animal that ----". It is not only psychologists who feel impelled to write "the Sentence", as Brian Christian calls these statements of human uniqueness. Versions of the Sentence can be found scattered throughout the writings of theologians and atheists, rationalists and existentialists, revolutionaries and reactionaries and every sort of social and cultural theorist. The attributes that are supposed to make human beings special have varied. Often those who insist that we belong in a different category from other animals fix on consciousness as the definitive human attribute.

Brian Christian is the author of The Most Human Human, which was named a Wall Street Journal bestseller and a New Yorker favourite book of 2011, and has been translated into ten languages. He is the coauthor, with Tom Griffiths, of Algorithms to Live By, available Spring 2016. The Most Human Human is a provocative, exuberant, and profound exploration of the ways in which computers are reshaping our ideas of what it means to be human. He has just released his latest book, Algorithms to Live By. Co-written with cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths, the book offers a fascinating exploration of how computer algorithms can be applied to our everyday lives, helping to solve common decision-making problems and illuminate the workings of the human mind.