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I rarely post about the adult book world here because I’m always deeply entrenched in middle grade and YA books. However, I can’t pass up the opportunity to brag about a high school classmate’s book deal! (I went to a tiny, magnet-like high school for science and technology, so this is very exciting for a reader/writer like me).

Janet Silver’s rookie season as a literary agent with Zachary Shuster Harmsworth continues, as the former editor and publisher has sold a book to Doubleday about artificial intelligence and the human mind by 24-year-old Brown grad Brian Christian.

The book will follow Mr. Christian’s efforts to “train” for the 2009 Loebner Prize, an annual competition to be held in September that aims to instantiate the Turing Test by asking judges to interact with a set of human beings and computers and then deduce which is which. (Mr. Christian will be one of the humans.) The grand prize is awarded to whoever builds the computer least easily distinguishable from a human being in its ability to respond to the judges’ prompts.

A separate prize honors the person whose responses are most often taken as human by judges. This is the prize that Mr. Christian is going for.