 There is little doubt that Turing would have been disappointed by the state of play at the end of the twentieth century. Participants in the Loebner Prize Competition—an annual event in which computer programmes are submitted to the Turing Test— had come nowhere near the standard that Turing envisaged. A quick look at the transcripts of the participants for the preceding decade reveals that the entered programs were all easily detected by a range of not-very-subtle lines of questioning. Moreover, major players in the field regularly claimed that the Loebner Prize Competition was an embarrassment precisely because we were still so far from having a computer programme that could carry out a decent conversation for a period of five minutes—see, for example, Shieber (1994). It was widely conceded on all sides that the programs entered in the Loebner Prize Competition were designed solely with the aim of winning the minor prize of best competitor for the year, with no thought that the embodied strategies would actually yield something capable of passing the Turing Test.