All of the AI chatbots competing to pass the Turing Test in the 18th Loebner Prize on Sunday managed to fool at least one of their human interrogators that they were in fact communicating with a human rather than a machine, according to a University of Reading statement.

One of the programs, Elbot, created by Fred Roberts, the winner of the $3000 2008 Loebner Bronze award, got even closer to the 30% Turing Test threshold set by 20th-century British mathematician, Alan Turing in 1950, by fooling 25% of human interrogators.

During the test, held at the University of Reading, the bots competed in a series of five-minute unrestricted conversations with human interrogators, attempting to pass themselves off as human.

“Today’s results actually show a more complex story than a straight pass or fail by one machine,” said Organiser of the Turing Test, Professor Kevin Warwick University of Reading’s School of Systems Engineering. “Where the machines were identified correctly by the human interrogators as machines, the conversational abilities of each machine was scored at 80 and 90%.

“This demonstrates how close machines are getting to reaching the milestone of communicating with us in a way in which we are comfortable. That eventual day will herald a new phase in our relationship with machines, bringing closer the time in which robots start to play an active role in our daily lives.”

The Turing Test followed the original test as outlined by Alan Turing in 1950. Under the official criteria of the Turing Test, a machine that fools more than 30% of the human interrogators is deemed to have passed the test.

Each of the machines identified as a machine by human interrogators received at least one 80-90% conversational ability score.