The first Loebner contest
On 8 November 1991 Boston's Computer Museum held the first contest for Hugh Loebner's prize, a restricted Turing test: ten judges from the public conversed on set topics with six programs and two people. Joseph Weintraub's program on whimsical conversation won; five judges rated it human.
Why it matters
The Turing test was run for the first time as a public contest with a prize, and it showed not what programs could do but how easily judges were fooled: by Shieber, a program was taken for a person eight times and a person for a program three times.
The first source is the paper by Stuart Shieber, a referee in the confederates' room, in its first arXiv version of 4 April 1994; the second is the report of the Computer Museum itself, the host of the contest (Winter 1992). To give programs a chance the conversation was restricted to one topic and a 'natural' tenor, with no 'trickery or guile'; judges and confederates were hired by newspaper advertisement and had no computer science expertise. Ten agents were planned; two confederates were eliminated by technical problems, leaving two, against six programs on computers in five states. The prize was $1,500 and a bronze medal; Loebner offered $100,000 for the first machine to pass the full test. The winner was a modified version of Weintraub's PC Therapist on whimsical conversation: by the museum's report it fooled five of ten judges, and four of the six programs fooled at least one. By Shieber the confederate who talked about Shakespeare was rated a computer three times; the museum's report says two judges took one of the humans for a computer, so the count differs between the sources. Shieber argues that limiting the domain does not limit the task and that the contest has no clear scientific purpose.