At the height of World War II, as Allied ocean convoys and Nazi German U-boats played a deadly battle of hide and seek in what we now call the Battle of the Atlantic, another invisible battle was also being fought. According to Britain's Imperial War Museum, it was a battle of information, pitting the German military's encryption technology, called Enigma, against a team of Allied codebreakers working from a top-secret British site called Bletchley Park. The leading British combatant in this maximum-stakes battle of wits was mathematician Alan Turing. Born in 1912, he was still in his twenties when the war broke out in 1939, but he was already a leading figure in the emerging field of cybernetics. Several years earlier, in 1936, he outlined the principles of computer technology in a paper describing what is still called a Turing machine -- a device capable of solving any computable mathematical function.

Collecting commonsense from text with the aid of a game can reduce the cost and effort of creating large knowledge bases. In this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate an online game that classifies, with input from players, text extracted from the Web as commonsense knowledge, domain-specific knowledge or nonsense. We also create a knowledge base that includes commonsense facts in natural language and information on how common a given fact is. The game is currently available for play on the Web and on Facebook, and under constant improvement. The creation of a continuous scale to classify commonsense helped during evaluation of the data by clearly identifying which knowledge is reliable and which needs further qualification. When comparing our results to other similar knowledge acquisition systems, our Turing Game performs better with respect to coverage,redundancy, and reliability of the commonsense acquired.