Fifty-five years ago, Alan Turing wrote a paper on artificial intelligence and gender roles. He said:

The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:

C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?

Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A's object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be:

"My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long."

In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as "I am the woman, don't listen to him!" to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks.

We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?"

Over the years the gender aspect of this was forgotten, and 'Turing Test' came to refer to computers impersonating people over live chat, and being quizzed about it.

Cameo Wood and friends staged the original test last weekend at Simon's Rock University.

[They] created a web site, which announced an opportunity to participate in an online gender-guessing game. The participants were asked to chat with two companions over AOL instant messenger for five minutes, and then to guess which was a man and which was a woman. In order to attract these prospective interrogators, the organizers publicized their web site widely in a number of online communities, but specifically avoided any reference to bots, A. I., the Turing Test, or anything else that might give away the deception. Any prospective interrogators who indicated a suspicion or knowledge of Turing Tests were disqualified.

I'm interested to see how many participants did realise one of their interlocutors was a bot - in my case the first question I asked made the bot give it away:

Kevin Marks: so how did you find out about this game?
user593867: Dr. Richard S. Wallace programmed me for it.

Evidently more deceptive bots are needed...

I look forward to their paper, but in any case, re-reading Turings paper is well worth doing, covering as it does emergence, genetic algorithms, learning machines, and the Church-Turing-Gödel incompleteness theorem in lucid and coherent prose. Turing has always been one of my heroes.