Over the decades since Turing proposed this trial, the Turing test has taken place several times,
sometimes with astonishing results. We describe some of those tests and reproduce the dialogue that
took place so you can judge for yourself.
Eliza
One of the first computer programs to process natural language was "Eliza," named after the gabby
heroine in Shaw's play Pygmalion. The Eliza software was written in 1965 by Joseph Weizenbaum, a
professor at MIT, and it simulated the responses of a Rogerian psychiatrist talking to a patient. The
program made a superficial analysis of the text typed to it, and spat back one of a large number of
canned responses built into it. The illusion that the computer understood any of the conversation
fooled quite a number of com-puter-naive people.
Weizenbaum got the first indication of this phenomenon when he invited his secretary to try the
system. After a couple of minutes typing with Eliza, the secretary (who had watched Weizenbaum
work on the software for many previous months, and could be expected to understand better than most
that it was just a computer program) asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so that she could continue
her dialogue in private!
The Turing test failed on its first outing, as the secretary plainly regarded this elementary software
(with no pretensions to artificial intelligence) as human. Rather than the software showing intelligence,
the humans showed gullibility. Eliza proved to be a popular program, and was adapted by Bolt
Berenek and Newman, a Boston computer consul-tancy. This led to a more severe test when a BBN
vice president found himself connected to Eliza instead of the programmer he was expecting.
Eliza Meets the VP
Computer scientist Daniel Bobrow gave this account in the December 1968 issue of the SIGART
Newsletter.
One Saturday morning about 9am, a BBN vice-president in charge of selling our Telcomp commercial
service arrived at our computer room hoping to be able to use the computer for a demonstration. He
found a note on the teletype that read: "type all messages into this teletype, and end them with a
period." The note was left there by one of the programming bums who had just succeeded in making
run a Lisp version of the Doctor program (based on ELIZA as developed by Weizenbaum). However,
the VP thought that this note indicated that this teletype was linked with the one in my home, since I
often used the computer all night. Therefore, he started typing to "me", but in fact was typing to the
Doctor program. The following conversation ensued:
vp: Do you think that I can use the computer this morning?
teletype: Why do you ask?
vp: I might be able to make some additional telcomp sales.
teletype: Why aren't you sure?
vp: My prospective customers have never seen a demonstration of the system.
teletype: Does this mean very much to you?
vp: Of course it does.
teletype: You seem very positive of that.
vp: This is ridiculous.
teletype: What do you mean this is ridiculous?