In the following sections we consider early artificial conversationalists and implementations of experiments to answer Turing's question can a machine think?. The claim for the first Turing test is asserted by Hugh Loebner, sponsor of the annual Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence. The first contest appeared in 1991. However, more than a decade earlier a computer program of a paranoid human confounded psychiatrists: they were not able to distinguish the simulation from a real patient (Heiser et al., 1979).

As we said in the previous chapter, during a practical Turing test, the actual goal of the machine is to provide satisfactory and sustained answers to any questions – in the realm of paranoia, PARRY, the program created by Colby et al. (1971, 1972), served this purpose. Christopher Strachey, a contemporary of Turing and a fellow student at King's College Cambridge, in 1952 wrote an algorithm that generated text intended to express and arouse emotions. It was the first machine to produce digital literature (Wardrip-Fruin, 2005). Here's an example of its output:

The distinguished linguist Noam Chomsky (2008) viewed the linguistic performance of a machine preferable to other ways of improving machine capacity and studying human intelligence. He considered that the Turing test provided a stimulus for two useful lines of research:

1. (a) improvement of the capacities of machines;

2. (b) investigating the intellectual properties of a human.

Chomsky believed therefore the imitation game is uncontroversial. He accepted Turing's intention as wanting to learn something about living things through the construction of a thinking machine. Moor (2004) contended that Turing's linguistic measure “is not essential to our knowledge about computer thinking … it provides one good format for gathering evidence” so that if a machine were to succeed against Turing's satisfactory and sustained response criterion “one would certainly have very adequate grounds for inductively inferring that the computer could think”.