Phys are reporting that a University Of Texas team won a $7000 in a competition to create game bots that would pass as human. “The winning bots both achieved a humanness rating of 52 percent. Human players received an average humanness rating of only 40 percent. The two winning teams will split the $7,000 first prize,” says the Phys report. “When this ‘Turing test for game bots’ competition was started, the goal was 50 percent humanness,” the bot’s creator, Risto Miikkulainen, is quoted as saying. “It took us five years to get there, but that level was finally reached last week, and it’s not a fluke.” The bot mimicked humans by pursuing grudges, having poor aim at long range, and by using neural networks to “evolve” the bot’s behaviour towards something that would be optimal in the game’s environment.

Does anyone know of any games that use bots for language responses? I can’t think of any offhand, but it must be going on, and there must be an intriguing state of the art for the “real” Turing Test in games.