Did 'Eugene Goostman' really pass the Turing test? It is being said that 'Eugene Goostman', a computer programme developed to simulate a 13-year-old boy, managed to convince 33 per cent of the judges that it was human, and thus passed the Turing Test.

The computer programme, aka a chatbot, was pretending to be a 13-year-old Ukranian boy for whom English was a second language – something very different indeed. 

For me, Eugene sounds exactly like a mediocre chatbot should: repetitive, nonsensical, and littered with non-sequiturs. I don't know how it convinced the judges (which seem unprofessional).

Many people have criticized Eugene like Prof Stevan Harnad who said "It's nonsense" and "We have not passed the Turing test. We are not even close."

Opinions differ, but I would really like to know if it officially passed the test? 

It is also being said that:


  Two one-time-only prizes that have never been
  awarded. 25K is offered for the first chatterbot that judges
  cannot distinguish from a real human and which can convince judges
  that the human is the computer program. $100,000 is the reward for the
  first chatterbot that judges cannot distinguish from a real human in a
  Turing test that includes deciphering and understanding text, visual,
  and auditory input. Once this is achieved, the annual competition will
  end.


Does it mean Eugene won $25,000?
There is no "official Turing test" so there's no concept of "officially pass[ing] the test". Turing described a methodology that one might use to evaluate artificial intelligences.  The organizers of the event that Eugene Goostman won implemented that methodology in a particular way and the program satisfied the criteria the organizers had chosen. In that sense, it passed the test.

Since there is no "official Turing test", it might be more appropriate to say that Eugene Goostman passed a Turing test or even passed a Turing-style test.  It's unlikely that the media would pick up on such subtleties, especially given Turing's fame and the idea of "the Turing test" in the public conscience.