It's early September and I wake up in a Brighton hotel, the sea crashing just outside. In a few hours, I will embark on what I have come here to do: have a series of five-minute-long instant-message exchanges with strangers. It may not sound like much, but the stakes for these quick chats are high. On the other side of the conversation will be a psychologist, a linguist, a broadcaster and a computer scientist. Together they will form a judging panel, evaluating my ability to do one of the strangest things I've been asked to do: convince them that I'm human.
Fortunately, I am human; unfortunately, it's not clear how much that will help.
I'm participating as a human "confederate": one of four representatives of homo sapiens in the artificial intelligence community's most anticipated annual event – a meeting to confer the Loebner prize on the winner of a competition called the Turing test. The test is named after mathematician Alan Turing, famed second world war code-breaker and one of the founders of computer science, who in 1950 attempted to answer one of the field's earliest questions: Can machines think?
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