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: a program was taken for a person eight times and a person for a program three times.
The source is the paper by Stuart Shieber, a referee in the confederates' room, in its first arXiv version of 4 April 1994. 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. The prize was $1,500; Loebner reportedly earmarked $100,000 for a program passing the full test. The confederate who talked about Shakespeare was rated a computer three times. Shieber argues that limiting the domain does not limit the task and that the contest has no clear scientific purpose. The record does not name the winning program: 'PC Therapist' does not occur in the paper.