The first Loebner Prize competition was held on November 8, 1991, at the Boston Computer Museum. In its first few years, the Loebner Prize gave each program and human confederate a “topic” as a means of limiting the conversation. In some ways, that first contest was a battle between style and content. One of the confederates was Shakespeare expert Cynthia Clay, who was, famously, deemed a computer by three different judges. The consensus seemed to be “No one knows that much about Shakespeare.”

Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive (2011)