5 The Code Book for Young PeopleThe next day I powered up the phone and tried to think of a good test for her. The standard test for an AI program is the Turing test. Basically, a test subject carries on a conversation with a computer and tries to discern whether it is, in fact, a computer or a human pretending to be one. There have been a few examples of successfully passing the test, but all the ones I had seen were pretty lame. One Russian program pretended to be a thirteen-year-old kid named Eugene Goostman. I was sure Saga was far ahead of any thirteen-year-old I ever knew.
I couldn’t use the Turing test myself because I already knew Saga was a computer program. Another problem was, no matter how well she did, the computer-generated voice was a giveaway. Good as it was, to me, it st
