Alan Turing, in his article, indicated that his "Imitation Game" test should take place through some sort of remote teletype linkup, but one thing he did not indicate explicitly was at what grain size the messages would be transmitted. By that, I mean that he did not say whether the messages should be transmitted as intact wholes, or line by line, word by word, or keystroke by keystroke. Although I don't think it matters for the Turing Test in any fundamental sense, I do think that which type of "window" you view another language-using being through has a definite bearing on how quickly you can make inferences about that being. Clearly, the most revealing of these possibilities is that of watching the other "person" operate at the keystroke level.

On most multi-user computer systems, there are various ways for different users to communicate with each other, and these ways reflect different levels of urgency. The slowest one is generally the "mail" facility, through which you can send another user an arbitrarily long piece of text, just like a letter in an envelope. When it arrives, it will be placed in the user's "mailbox", to be read at their leisure. A faster style of communicating is called, on Unix systems, "write". When this is invoked, a direct communications link is set up between you and the person you are trying to reach (provided they are logged on). If they accept your link, then any full line typed by either of you will be instantly transmitted and printed on the other party's screen—where a lineful is signaled by your hitting the carriage-return key. This is essentially what the Nicolai team used in communicating with me over the Kansas computer. Their irregular typing rhythm and any errors they might have made were completely concealed from me this way, since all I saw was a sequence of completely polished lines (with the two spelling errors "coookie" and "progammer", which I was willing to excuse because Nicolai generated them in a "joke" context).

The most revealing mode is what, on Unix, is called "talk". In this mode, every single keystroke is revealed. You make an error, you are exposed. For some people, this is too much like living in a glass house, and they prefer the shielding afforded by "write". For my part, I like living dangerously. Let the mistakes lfy! In computer-mediated conversations with my friends, I always opt for "talk". I have been amused to watch their "talk" styles and my own slowly evolve to relatively stable states. When we in the Indiana University Computer Science Department first began using the "talk" facility, we were all somewhat paranoid about making errors, and we would compulsively fix any error that we made. By this, I mean that we would backspace and retype the character. The effect on the screen of hitting the backspace key repeatedly is that you see the most recently typed characters getting eaten up, one by one, right to left, and if necessary, the previous line and ones above it will get eaten backwards as well. Once you have erased the offending mistakes, you simply resume typing forwards. This is how errors are corrected. We all began in this finicky way, feeling ashamed to let anything flawed remain "in print", so to speak, visible to others' eyes. But gradually we overcame that sense of shame, realizing that a typo sitting on a screen is not quite so deathless as one sitting on a page in a book.

Still, I found that some people just let things go more easily than others. For instance, by the length of the delay after a typo is made, you can tell just how much its creator is hesitating in wondering whether to correct it. Hesitations of a fraction of a second are very noticeable, and are part of a person's style. Even if a typo is left uncorrected, you can easily spot someone's vacillations about whether or not to fix it.

The counterparts of these things exist on many levels of such exchanges. There are the levels oi word choice (for instance, some people who don't mind having their typos on display will often backtrack and get rid of words they now repudiate), sentence-structure choice, idea choice, and higher. Hesitations and repairs or restarts are very common. I find nothing so annoying as someone who has gotten an idea expressed just fine in one way, and who then erases it all on the screen before your eyes and proceeds to compose it anew, as if one way of suggesting getting together for dinner at Pagliai's at 6 were markedly superior to another!

There are ways of exploiting erasure in "talk" mode for the purposes of humor. Don Byrd and I, when "talk"tng, would often make elaborate jokes exploiting the medium in various ways. One of his I recall vividly was when he hurled a nasty insult onto the screen and then swiftly erased it, replacing it by a sweetly worded compliment, which remained for posterity to see— at least for another minute or so. One of our great discoveries was that some "arrow" keys allowed us to move all over the screen, thus to go many lines up in the conversation and edit earlier remarks by either of us. This allowed some fine jokes to be made.

One hallmark of one's "talk" style is one's willingness to use abbreviations. This is correlated with one's willingness to abide typos, but is not by any means the same. I personally was the loosest of all the "talkers" I knew, both in terms of leaving typos on the screen and in terms of peppering my sentences with all sorts of silly abbreviations. For instance, I will now retype this very sentence as 1 would have in "talk mode", below. F ins, I will now retype ts very sent as I wod hv in "talko mode", below. Not bad! Only two typos. The point is, the communication rate is raised considerably—nearly to that of a telephone—if you type well and are willing to be informal in all these ways, but many people are surprisingly uptight about their unpolished written prose being on exhibit for others to see, even if it is going to vanish in mere seconds.

All of this I bring up not out of mere windbaggery, but because it bears strongly on the Turing Test. Imagine the microscopic insights into personality that are afforded by watching someone—human or otherwise— typing away in "talk" mode! You can watch them dynamically making and unmaking various word choices, you can see interferences between one word and another causing typos, you can watch hesitations about whether or not to correct a typo, you can see when they are pausing to work out a thought before typing it, and on and on. If you are just a people-watcher, you can merely observe informally. If you are a psychologist or fanatic, you can measure reaction times in thousandths of a second, and make large collections and catalogue them. Such collections have really been made, by the way, and make for some of the most fascinating reading on the human mind that I know of. See, for instance, Donald Norman's article "Categorization of Action Slips" or Victoria Fromkin's book Errors of Linguistic Performance: Slips of the Tongue, Ear, Pen, and Hands. In any case, when you can watch someone's real-time behavior, a real live personality begins to appear on a screen very quickly. It is far different in feel from reading polished, post-edited linefuls such as I received from Nicolai. It seems to me that Alan Turing would have been most intrigued and pleased by this time-sensitive way of using his test, affording so many lovely windows onto the subconscious mind (or pseudo-mind) of the being (or pseudo-being) under examination.