The only problem with the test is that people often seem to mistake it for a direction, rather than a finish line. I don't believe we'll ever pass a properly conducted Turing test merely by constructing ever more elaborate Eliza clones any more than we could reach the moon by building a really *good* wooden ladder. You could build a hundred meter one and call it progress, but compared to the guy playing with rockets who's yet to get a centimetre off the ground you've accomplished nothing.

Events like the Loebner are thus ultimately a sideshow – building a better chatbot might fool some people, but it will never get you over the finish line – don't mistake it for progress.

The Loebner is a very watered down version of the Turing test (short timespan, only 30% of people etc) – the real test involves an interrogator actively trying to distinguish who is what. Because questions are completely open, the qualities required to deal with such a conversation ultimately covers everything we think of as our mental faculties.

It would be much *easier* to write a computer that matches or surpasses a human on an IQ test than it would to pass the turing test. IQ tests are a fairly restricted domain of questions after all. I suspect that such a program could easily be written today.

Just as Deep Blue brute-forced it in chess with speed, the idea behind the Chatbot Game is to brute-force it with a huge number of user-submitted Google-like chat rules.