Call Deckard: 'bot tricks judge into thinking it's human

The Loebner Prize is awarded to programmers who can create the most lifelike interactive program. This year the money went to Bruce Wilcox for his chatbot "Suzette," which even managed to convince a judge it was human after a 25 minute convesation.

Suzette isn't technically the first program to confuse Loebner judges — in the past, however, conversations only lasted five minutes. Now, judges have 25 consecutive spans of 60 seconds to grill both a human and a program without knowing which is which. When all was said and done, one judge thought Suzette wasn't the chatbot.

For the bulk of the time, judges stick to questions similar to a Turing test, asking about the time, the function of objects (such as a hammer), relationships between objects (which coin is the largest, for instance), and the memory of the participant.

You can actually give an earlier version of Suzette a spin, though we have to say we don't find it to be very convincing at all. Then again, we knew what Suzette was from the get-go.