Artificial intelligence of progress. AlphaGo around 2016 brought the era of classical board-game benchmarks to a close. Games of imperfect knowledge provide new challenges to AI in the area of game theory. E-sports such as StarCraft continue to provide additional public benchmarks. There are many competitions and prizes, such as the Imagenet Challenge, to promote research in artificial intelligence. The most common areas of competition include general machine intelligence, conversational behavior, data-mining, robotic cars, and robot soccer as well as conventional games. The "imitation game" (an interpretation of the 1950 Turing test that assesses whether a computer can imitate a human) is
Turing test much academic or commercial effort—as Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig write: "AI researchers have devoted little attention to passing the Turing test." There are several reasons. First, there are easier ways to test their programs. Most current research in AI-related fields is aimed at modest and specific goals, such as automated scheduling, object recognition, or logistics. To test the intelligence of the programs that solve these problems, AI researchers simply give them the task directly. Russell and Norvig suggest an analogy with the history of flight: Planes are tested by how well they fly, not by comparing them to birds.