Turing's Frist Imitation Game: Design Concepts and a Human-Approximates-Machine Reading

This paper examines Turing's 1948 report, "Intelligent Machinery", as an important conceptual source for the later imitation games. Its first contribution is to identify and integrate the design concepts underlying the 1948 chess-based imitation game: the possibility that intelligent machines may make mistakes, the exclusion of irrelevant physical features, the role of the human judge, and Turing's claim that intellectual activity consists mainly of search. The paper's second contribution is to argue that restricting the human contestant to a rather poor chess player increases the role of intellectual search and makes human behaviour more comparable to machine behaviour. This interpretation presents the 1948 game as a human-approximates-machine game and suggests that the imitation game framework can be used not only to ask whether machines imitate humans, but also to examine when human intelligence becomes machine-like under specific task constraints.

Learning User Simulators with Turing Rewards

Learning to simulate human users in interactive settings could advance the training of agent assistants, evaluation of personalization systems, research in the social sciences, and more. Existing approaches generally do so by training a large language model (LLM) to match a single ground truth response, either by maximizing the log probability or by using a similarity reward. We instead propose {Turing-RL}: a Turing-Test-based reinforcement learning approach for training user simulator models. {Turing-RL} uses a discriminative Turing reward with an LLM judge to score how indistinguishable a generated response is from the real user's given the user's history, and the user simulator LLM learns to produce responses indistinguishable from what the user could have said with such rewards. Across two different domains--conversational chat and Reddit forum discussion--we find that {Turing-RL} consistently outperforms baseline methods on both LLM and human evaluation metrics. Our study suggests that optimizing for indistinguishability, rather than response matching, is effective for learning user simulators.

RogueAI: A Reverse Turing Test for Detecting Licensed AI Deception in Dialogue

The original Turing Test asks a human judge to distinguish a machine from a person through dialogue. Three quarters of a century later, conversational systems pass this test in casual settings; the interesting epistemological question has shifted. We argue that the relevant modern variant asks not whether a dialogue partner is artificial, but whether it can be trusted. We present RogueAI, an interactive webapp that operationalizes this revisited test as a one-on-two interrogation game: a human player questions two indistinguishable Large Language Model agents, knowing that exactly one of them has been licensed to deceive within a shared fictional scenario. The player's task is to identify the deceptive agent and "shut it off" before a turn budget is exhausted. We further introduce AutoRogueAI, a procedural extension in which players co-design a custom scenario with a narrator agent that secretly chooses its own deception strategy. We describe the framing, sketch the abstract architecture and gameplay loop, and situate the artifact within recent work on LLM deception, social-deduction benchmarks, and scalable oversight via debate. A three-day pilot deployment (467 initiated sessions, 415 completed, 1876 interaction turns in Italian) provides early feasibility evidence and surfaces a concrete tension: the deceptive agent carries a reliable, locally-present linguistic signature - differential helpfulness, brevity, hedging - that a simple heuristic exploits at 75.6% accuracy, yet human players achieved only 56.6%, consistent with ignoring the most diagnostic signal entirely. We discuss what this gap implies for the artifact's use as a data-collection vehicle, a teaching tool, and an evaluation harness for honesty-trained models.