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avatar was controlled by a program, in one interaction the controller was a man—and the sub-
jects did not detect any difference in the character’s emotional responses. In a ‘hide-and-seek
test’, judges decide whether a virtual character, who chooses a route to hide and seek, is a human
or a computer. In the ‘BotPrize competition’, a human player ‘shoots’ against an avatar that is
controlled by either a human or a program and then judges the opponent’s ‘humanness’. Again
the machine player should not shoot too accurately; judges tend to class those with good aim or
fast reaction time as non-human. In the 2012 competition the most successful programs gained
a higher humanness rating than the human players; this was reported as ‘bots beat Turing test:
AI players are officially more human than gamers’! The programmer of one of the winning bots
claimed that his program had ‘crossed the humanness barrier’.^24
There is even a Turing-like ‘handshake test’ to measure ‘motor’ intelligence (a human subject
‘shakes hands’ with a lever, controlled by either a human or a computer, and decides which
handshake is more human-like)—and also a test to decide whether an online social media
account is genuine or a ‘Sybil’ (a fake account). Outside computer science, it has been suggested
that Turing’s game could test for a living system: a natural cell ‘interrogates’ both a natural cell
and an artificial cell. In an ‘ideological’ Turing test, contestants explain an ideology contrary to
figure 27.2 Which contestant is the machine?
Reprinted from xkcd, http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/turing_test.