An idea spawned by the Dyson talk: Kurzweil wants computers to think themselves smart. You write a piece of software than generates a million possibly intelligent instances, run them all in parallel, choose the most intelligent, use them as start-points for another million, repeat as necessary. The sticking point: how do you evaluate the most successful of each generation?
Answer: You point the software at IRC channels, have it impersonate human participants. A meta-process waits for someone to ask, "Goddammit, are you a bot?" whereupon you terminate the process. Millions of human IRC participants become unwilling proctors for a series of Turing Tests.
