

Mind vs. Machine (by contestant in Loebner Prize Turing test) - tokenadult
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/03/mind-vs-machine/8386/

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Jun8
As is many times pointed in this article, it is quite possible to have an
engaging conversation with a bot on a well-defined topic, e.g. ELIZA or the
_Hamlet_ example given here. The problem with them is what I would call the
"Truman Show Effect", i.e. when you go to the edge of the topic, what you see
is not a graceful blending to other areas, as in humans, but just a wall.

So, with my colleagues over lunch I can chat about the Chinese language, the
current situation in Egypt, the relative merits of iPad vs Kindle, why our
company is going down, the gender gap in technology (this with great empathy
and motivation because our ratio is like 30 to 1) and so on. Try doing _that_
with any chatterbot. And this is not even the usual guy talk in front of TV,
which, I think, is even harder for the likes of Watson to emulate.

