First Winner of the Turing Test Tournament
30 September 2013
Berkeley Center for New Media is pleased to recognize Brianna Grado-White as the first monthly winner of the Turing Test Tournament, an online campus chat game. Every month, BCNM recognizes a Turing Test Tournament player with the highest leaderboard score and awards the designated UC Berkeley student organization with a $1000 prize. As the September winner, Grado-White, a UC Berkeley senior majoring in Physics, Math, and Astronomy, has designated the Society of Women in Science as the prize recipient. The Society of Women in Science will put the Turing Test Tournament funds towards their upcoming Fall Networking Dinner.
The Turing Test Tournament is a new online chat game for UC Berkeley’s incoming class of 2013 co-developed by BCNM professor and new media artist Greg Niemeyer and a team of BCNM graduate and undergraduate artists, humanists, and technologists. Launched in August 2013, the Turing Test Tournament is the UC Berkeley chat-based version of Alan Turing's famous test for machine intelligence. The Turing Test Tournament was developed for UC Berkeley’s On the Same Page Program in partnership with the Berkeley Center for New Media. Inspired by On the Same Page Program's selected reading of Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by science historian George Dyson, the Turing Test Tournament provides an interactive engagement with the strange and fascinating history of the digital electronic computer.
Fostering interaction and performance, thousands of Berkeley students, faculty, and staff are able to engage with the Turing Test Tournament in an online contest. Players try to figure out human from machine through chat-based competition and determine how convincingly a role is performed. While created for the incoming class of 2013, anyone with an @berkeley.edu email address can play the Turing Test Tournament. The game is in beta and new versions and levels are currently being developed.
BCNM recently hosted "Meet Your Bot Hackathon" where players and hackers learned how to upgrade Turing Test Tournament Bots. Participants won prizes for creating the "most human bot" and special judge Bruce Wilcox, artificial intelligence programmer who worked on chatbot technology for Avatar Reality, was on hand to answer questions. The "Meet Your Both Hackathon" is one of many events this year that celebrates the Turing Test Tournament's emphasis on questioning digital history, culture, and identity.
The Turing Test Tournament Team includes:
Greg Niemeyer, Project Director, Professor for New Media and Director, BCNM
Elizabeth Keegan, Lead Game Designer
Nathaniel Mailoa, Web Design CSS Lead
Dibyo Majumdar, Lead, AI Development
Gaurav Garg, AI Development
Danielle Alojado, Artist
Art Siriwatt, Marketing
Lenna Nguyen, Artist
Margaret Rhee, Lead Concept and Project Manager
Chris Geotz, Concept and Consultant
Nora Liddell, Project Coordinator/Manager, BCNM
Kiera Chase, Research Associate
Alix Schwartz, Director, On the Same Page, and Project Patron
Rita Hao, Legal Counsel, UCOP
For more information, please visit: