Take game-playing, for example. To rival or surpass human cognitive powers in something more sophisticated than mere number-crunching, Turing thought that chess might be a good place to start – a game that seems to be characterised by strategic thinking, perhaps even invention. After Deep Blue’s victory over World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, we have clearly crossed that particular threshold. And we now have algorithms that are all but invincible (in the long term) for bluffing games like poker – although this turns out to be less psychological than you might think, and more a matter of hard maths.



What about something more creative and ineffable, like music? Machines can fool us there too. There is now a music-composing computer called Iamus, which produces work sophisticated enough to be deemed worthy of attention by professional musicians. Iamus’s developer Francisco Vico of the University of Malaga and his colleagues carried out a kind of Turing Test by asking 250 subjects – half of them professional musicians – to listen to one of Iamus’s compositions and music in a comparable style by human composers, and decide which is which. “The computer piece raises the same feelings and emotions as the human one, and participants can’t distinguish them”, says Vico. “We would have obtained similar results by flipping coins.”

Some say that computer poetry has passed the test too, though one can’t help thinking that this says more about the discernment of the judges. Consider the line: “you are a sweet-smelling diamond architecture”.