Turing competition results: What would a machine say?

Rowan Hooper, news editor

A few weeks ago we decided to mark the centenary of the birthday of Alan Turing on 23 June by asking you to speculate on the first words to be spoken by a conscious machine. For your efforts we put up a prize of a copy of Turing's Princeton PhD thesis, "Systems of logic based on ordinals", along with a stylish and functional New Scientist dispatch bag filled with goodies.

There was an encouraging, mainly sci-fi-referencing response from more than 600 of you, but the news team have pored over the entries and we have a winner:

Checkmate

This was Roberto's suggestion, and we liked it for the range and depth of possibilites it implied. Roberto, get in touch at news@newscientist.com or on Twitter, and we'll send you your prize.

Special mention goes to David Andrews for "You are meat. Meat can talk?" and to Bruce Sterling for "That really hurts."

Sate your Turing hunger via our "Instant Expert: Alan Turing's legacy".

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