Dr Hugh Loebner was a divisive man. Father of the controversial Loebner Prize - an annual competition that sees AI systems pitted against a group of scientists in a real time chat conversation in order to try to pass as humans - he was a much maligned figure in the scientific community, with his worst critics going so far as to call his competition little more than a beauty pageant for computers. Some of the more eminent professors such as the late Marvin Minsky even considered the event detrimental to the development of artificial intelligence, pointing out the redundancy of the Turing Test method on which the contest was based, making Hugh Loebner persona non grata in the field of computer engineering according to many.

But year after year, in spite of organisational difficulties and the stigma thrust upon the event by the scientific community’s collective frown, computer programmers turned up in order to put their artificial intelligence machine to the (Turing) test, hoping to be the first in the examination’s history to convince the panel of judges of its humanity. To date, after 25 years, none has been so successful. And yet, year after year, programmers flock to the circus that is Loebner’s yearly festival, eager to present to the judges that which can be deemed sufficiently human to take home the top prize.

A man with a quite open predilection for pot, prostitutes and plonk (not to mention a distracting obsession with the purity of Olympic gold medals), Dr Loebner has been described variously as a “control freak” and, according to one article, a “chronic pain in the ass” but ultimately, his motivation was an essentially very human one, with his main ambition being a computer system so intelligent and complex that it would be qualified to take from mankind all of its labour, leaving people free to indulge in their whims.

“He was obviously an eccentric who has his passions and could indulge them and didn’t worry about the opinions of others.” says respected “AI Guru” Dr Bruce Wilcox, a consistent winner in chatbot competitions, who met Hugh Loebner during the first Loebner Prize event and who still participates with his wife today, placing first, second and third in the last three years. “The scientific community prefers the academic non-showman approach to things and doesn’t understand the value of promotion and controversy. A lot of colour will now disappear from the contest.”

But it is in such impulse that lies the crucial problem when it comes to the realisation of his dream, for however intelligent the AI was, it failed to emulate that need for such indulgence. They could never be creatures of impulse like Dr Hugh Loebner, bent on preserving the values of Alan Turing at the same time as being a staunch advocate for human freedom and leisure, most pointedly in his tireless campaigning for the legalisation of prostitution.

“The average human brain has about a hundred billion neurons and about a hundred trillion connections between them.” Thomas Eric Whalen PhD, one of the first competitors and a research scientist at — until his retirement explained to me in trying to diagram the size of the task facing computer scientists. “These connections transmit electrical pulses at a speed of about a thousand pulses per second – which is how we perceive stimuli and respond to them. These connections change as they are used – which is where learning happens. If we make even the simplest possible software model of a neuron and then try to simulate a hundred billion of them, we won’t have enough computing power.”

Dr Wilcox, whose own chatbot Angela has seen use by millions of people worldwide, was similarly skeptical about the prospects of AI technology truly emulating human beings: “The task of a chatbot is to create an illusion – the illusion that you are talking with someone who un­derstands and cares about what you are saying. It doesn’t. However, for moments at a time it is possible to fake it. Just remember, it is an illusion we are creating. Just like magicians and actors do. But the illusion is the character expressed.”

But there can be little illusion about Dr Hugh Loebner, a man who laid bare even his innermost desires. And while many of the increasingly household AI systems like Siri and Cortana might someday be able to do a cleaner job of organising the Loebner Prize in its father’s absence, there is little to suggest they would ever be able to replicate the man’s showmanship, his passion and his ability to unite some of the most dedicated and skilled programmers working in the field today. Because Dr Loebner was, for all of his obsessions, distractions and faults, persona, non computatrum.