Last month a callow youth with the unprepossessing name of Eugene Goostman made a landmark achievement in the august surroundings of the Royal Society, the world's oldest scientific academy: He was able to convince the judges for a third of the time that he was a 13-year old Ukrainian boy and not the "chatbot" that he really is.
In so doing, "Goostman" passed the Turing test, named after mathematician Alan Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence."
British organizers of the competition were overexcited at young Goostman's achievement. It is proving to be an interesting landmark year for robots, perhaps less so for humans.