Hello and thank you for downloading our history program witness on the BBC World Service with me Rachel Gilman.

Today I'm taking you back to 1991 and the world of artificial intelligence. called the Loebner Prize was being held for the first time at the Computer Museum in Boston.

A panel of human judges had to determine whether they were communicating with another human or with a computer.

The winner was the computer that most fooled the judges.

It was a madhouse. We had screens set up, big screens on each screen you could see in real time

the conversations that were unraveling as the typing was occurring and each judge had to switch seats after about 13 minutes

at each terminal conversing with each of the eight entities and all they knew is that at least two of the entities were

computers and at least two were people. Dr Robert Epstein was the first director and

organizer of the contest.

This event made the front page of the New York Times and of course that led to media pickup

around the world.

I mean, just the level of interest astounded me in my mind kind of an obscure thing that turned into this

extra-gansa. Obscure it might have been, but it was an idea a long time in the making.

Way back in the 1950s, the renowned British mathematician and World War II codebreaker Alan Turing,

had come up with a theory that became known as the Turing test.

He proposed that someday we could get a computer to converse with people so well that it could

fool, he said, the average interrogator into thinking that it was a person

70% of the time for about five minutes. Absolutely uncanny, incredible prediction.

You know, 50 years in the future that this was going to be the case at a time when computers barely even existed.

Machine intelligence had fascinated researchers even before Turing's theory.

But after he published his paper,

eminent computer scientists set about inventing computer programs to try to pass the Turing test.

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