Just what is this all about then?

Well, about 2 years ago, I decided to learn Perl/CGI. The first script I wrote was the predecessor of this site, and it has served its purpose well, and has astounded me with its success - over the past two years this page has had over 10,000 questions added, and well over 25,000 pageviews... Now that can't be bad.

For a list of what's been updated on the site (apart from the design, of course), check out the list at the bottom of this page.

No, I mean what's it really about?

Ah, that old one... The aim of this site is simply to attempt to collect the largest possible number of individual questions that could be asked during a Turing test. For a brief outline of what the Turing Test is, have a look at my quick definition. For those of you who aren't easily satisfied, there are some more links on that page too... For information on Alan Turing himself, have a wander over to www.turing.org.uk.

And what's for the future?

Well, the main thing I'm hoping to do is get things more interactive, and actually get answers to all the questions people have been entering. The idea is that once you've asked a question, you get asked one back which you have to answer. After that, you get shown an answer that someone else has given to a question previously asked, and you rate it out of (say) 10 as to how reasonable an answer it were. By doing this, I could build up a repository of answers to any question asked...

Don't ask me what I'd do with it after that... :o)

How popular is the site?

For some strange reason, very. It's currently recieving an average of 60 unique visitors a day, and has (at time of writing) clocked up a massive 25,000 pageviews. Well over 10,000 questions were asked on the 'original' site. So far, with the new and improved site, the front page has had 260 pageviews. A large number of posts from the original site have been removed (around 4000) do to repeat questions, or people swearing, tauting propeganda, or just generally abusing the site.

This page has also been linked to from all over the world. It has been quoted in conference papers here, and has appeared in lecture notes for various courses all over the place, for example here, and a few more that I can't find at the moment. I've even been quoted directly.

So what's new with the site?

Well, where do I start...? I have decided that it is now time to, in effect, start again with the site. This time, there's a whole new bunch of features, which should hopefully help by reducing the amount of rubbish, and also to speed up download times:

• Question filtering to try and stop people typing offensive phrases, and also to make sure that the question asked isn't exactly the same as another one.
• A simple search engine to find previous questions that have been asked
• Previous questions are now displayed in sensible amounts, rather than just one HUGE list
• A nice little 'random question' picker
• Everything's coming from a MySQL database now, rather than just a text file
• Of course, there's the funky new design...

Can I use your collection of questions?

Sure, if you want to. I'm sure there's an academic use for the questions somewhere... Just contact me at tim@badpen.com.

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