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).

The contest invites private teams from around the world to build a robotic rover capable of roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and then sending video, images and data back to Earth, among other feats. The idea behind the challenge is to urge private industry to develop new robotic and virtual-presence technology to reduce the cost of space exploration. "The Google Lunar X Prize calls on entrepreneurs, engineers and visionaries from around the world to return us to the lunar surface and explore this environment for the benefit of all humanity," said Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, a nonprofit prize-generating group. We look forward to bringing the historic private space race into every home and classroom." The X Prize Foundation staged a splashy event to announce the contest here at the Wired NextFest conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Diamandis, Google co-founder Larry Page and former astronaut Buzz Aldrin were all on hand to talk about the prize. The press conference also featured video commentary from Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Tesla Motors backer Elon Musk and filmmaker James Cameron, who applauded new private industry efforts in space exploration. "We're going back to the moon not because of a massive government program...This is Moon 2.0 with private industry...kick-starting the future of space exploration," Cameron said. The contest comes at a time when NASA is working on new spacecraft and technology to take man back to the moon within the next 12 years. At a recent artificial-intelligence conference, Peter Norvig, the former head of computation at NASA's Ames facility who is now Google's director of research, suggested that the space agency is taking the more expensive approach in trying to send astronauts to the moon and that it should focus on robotics. Page, who is a trustee of the X Prize Foundation, said that he and Google co-founder Brin were excited to fund the prize because they wanted to get kids around the world excited about engineering, math and science. "I gave a speech recently, saying that science has a serious marketing problem.

In October 2004 SpaceShipOne roared into space (twice) - the first privately funded spacecraft ever to reach suborbit, nearly 70 miles above Earth. A year later, "Stanley," a Volkswagen Touareg modified by Stanford University students, rumbled across some 130 miles of desert without a human driver, navigating the rough terrain guided by computer programs and sensors. In both cases, the designers were motivated to be the first to do something - and to win a cash prize. The Ansari X PRIZE for spaceflight paid out $10 million from a private foundation. The DARPA Grand Challenge for robotic vehicles awarded $2 million, put up by the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

At a gala charity event Saturday night featuring "Avatar" director James Cameron, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and a who's who of tech industry luminaries, the X Prize Foundation laid out its vision for the next five years. Already in 2004, the foundation has paid out $10 million in prize money for the winner of the Ansari X Prize, which in 2004 went to the first non-governmental team to launch a vehicle into space twice in two weeks. The prize winners were Burt Rutan and the Paul Allen-backed team that built SpaceShipOne. The foundation offers both X Prizes--$10 million or more for large-scale competitions focused on global problems that may take between three and eight years to solve--and X Challenges, awards on the order of $1 million for technology challenges and breakthroughs that have a time frame of one to two years. Currently, the foundation is offering up millions of dollars in prize money for the first teams to sequence 100 genomes in 10 days (the $10 million Archon X Prize); to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, data and images back to Earth (the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize); and to produce green, production-ready cars capable of exceeding 100 miles per gallon or its energy equivalent (the $10 million Progressive Automotive X Prize).