Introduction

1950: British mathematician Alan Turing introduces his variation on the "Imitation Game", now referred to as the "Turing Test", which in his words would "[draw] a... fairly sharp line between the physical and intellectual capacities of a man." He proposes that a machine capable of passing this test would be able to "compete with men in all purely intellectual fields," and that by the year 2000, computers would be capable of passing a five-minute test 3 times out of 10. (Wikipedia - Turing Test)

2006: 56 years later, six years after Turing's suggested date, and with 14 years until futurist Ray Kurzweil's prediction of totally Turing-capable computers, the goal of passing the Turing Test has been reduced to a sideshow or afterthought in artificial intelligence development. (Wikipedia - Turing Test) The closest modern equivalent, the Loebner Prize, has been called "obnoxious and stupid" by leading minds in artificial intelligence, and the common consensus is that the chatbots being tested are utterly inadequate, an opinion that Hugh Loebner himself agrees with. (Sundman)

What happened? Why has the so-called "holy grail" of artificial intelligence fallen so far in esteem, so far as to be referred to as "irrelevant" (Sundman)? Is the Loebner Prize a worthwhile venture for modern AI development? Is Turing's aforementioned split between the physical and the intellectual desirable in developing intelligent systems?