Home Page of The Loebner Prize--"The First Turing Test"

The Loebner Prize is the first formal instantiation of a Turing Test. The test is named after Alan Turing the brilliant British mathematician. Among his many accomplishments was basic research in computing science. In 1950, in the article Computing Machinery and Intelligence which appeared in the philosophical journal Mind, Alan Turing asked the question "Can a Machine Think?"He answered in the affirmative, but a central question was: "If a computer could think, how could we tell?" Turing's suggestion was, that if the responses from the computer were indistinguishable from that of a human,the computer could be said to be thinking.

In 1990 Hugh Loebner agreed with The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies to underwrite a contest designed to implement the Turing Test. Dr. Loebner pledged a Grand Prize of $100,000 and a Gold Medal (pictured above) for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's. Each year an annual prize of $2000 and a bronze medal is awarded to the most human computer. The winner of the annual contest is the best entry relative to other entries that year, irrespective of how good it is in an absolute sense.

Further information on the development of the Loebner Prize and the reasons for its existence is available in Loebner's article In Response to the article Lessons from a Restricted Turing Test by Stuart Shieber.

The 10th Annual Loebner Prize will be held at Dartmouth College on 28 January 2000 in conjuction with a conference on the Turing Test.

Dr. Hugh Loebner and the Science Museum (London, England) signed, on 3 February 1999, an Agreement For Running the Loebner Prize Contest to be hosted by the Science Museum from the year 2001. It is anticipated that the Science Museum will host the contest for at least 44 years, unless the Grand Prize is won earlier.