Algorithms help us to choose which films to watch, which music to stream and which literature to read. But what if algorithms went beyond their jobs as mediators of human culture and started to create culture themselves? In 1950 English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing published a paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," which starts off by proposing a thought experiment that he called the "Imitation Game." In one room is a human "interrogator" and in another room a man and a woman. The goal of the game is for the interrogator to figure out which of the unknown hidden interlocutors is the man and which is the woman.

Last summer, two professors at Dartmouth College proposed an imaginative variation: the Turing Tests in Creative Arts, challenging participants to submit algorithms that can generate human-quality art. "Specifically," Dan Rockmore (a professor of math and computer science) and Michael Casey (a professor of music and computer science) write in an essay that discusses the project, "we ask if machines are capable of generating sonnets, short stories, or dance music that is indistinguishable from human-generated works, though perhaps not yet so advanced as Shakespeare, O. Henry or Daft Punk." The competition has three parts: DigiLit, where the test is creating a New Yorker-level short story; PoetiX, where the product must be a 14-line sonnet in iambic pentameter; and AlgoRhythms, where the computer has to create a 15-minute dance set. In all cases, the software will be given a "seed" - a verbal image in the literary contest and a single track of music for the dance. Organizers will mix the entries in with human-generated work.

Algorithms help us to choose which films to watch, which music to stream and which literature to read. But what if algorithms went beyond their jobs as mediators of human culture and started to create culture themselves? In 1950 English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing published a paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," which starts off by proposing a thought experiment that he called the "Imitation Game." In one room is a human "interrogator" and in another room a man and a woman. The goal of the game is for the interrogator to figure out which of the unknown hidden interlocutors is the man and which is the woman.