Alan Turing, a British mathematician and computer scientist, first rose to fame as a code breaker during World War II. In 1950, he published a paper called “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” introducing the question of whether machines have the capacity to think.

Because the concept of thinking is difficult to define or quantify, Turing proposed a different question: “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?” Turing’s question pinpointed  whether a computer could be devised to so closely imitate human interaction, as to potentially convince humans they are talking to other humans.

For a computer to pass as a human, the Turing test required 30 percent of the humans interacting with the machine to believe themselves talking to another person, rather than a machine.

On Saturday, on the 60th anniversary of Turing’s death and the six-month anniversary of his pardon by the British government for being a homosexual, the Royal Society in London held the Turing Test 2014. Under the rules of the competition, a computer is required to be mistaken for a human by more than 30 percent of humans after a five minute keyboard conversation. This year, five supercomputers attempted to meet the challenge.

According to a statement from the University of Reading, that challenge has now successfully become a milestone in artificial intelligence. “Eugene Goostman,” a computer program “born” in 2001, is designed to simulate a 13-year-old boy. Eugene managed to fool 33 percent of the people it interacted with, meeting Turing’s famed criteria for the first time.

Eugene is the brainchild of Russian-born Vladimir Veselov, who has since immigrated to the United States, and Ukrainian-born Eugene Demchenko, who now lives in Russia.

“Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn’t know everything. We spent a lot of time developing a character with a believable personality. This year we improved the ‘dialog controller’ which makes the conversation far more human-like when compared to programs that just answer questions. Going forward we plan to make Eugene smarter and continue working on improving what we refer to as ‘conversation logic,'” said Veselov.

The successful surmounting of the Turing test raises some alarms. A computer able to accurately simulate human interaction could help cyber criminals and fraudsters fool people.

“Of course the Test has implications for society today. Having a computer that can trick a human into thinking that someone, or even something, is a person we trust is a wake-up call to cyber crime. The Turing Test is a vital tool for combating that threat. It is important to understand more fully how online, real-time communication of this type can influence an individual human in such a way that they are fooled into believing something is true…when in fact it is not,” said Kevin Warwick, a Visiting Professor at the University of Reading.

This is only the latest leap ahead in the field of artificial intelligence. In fact, this May, a Hong Kong venture capitalist firm placed an artificially intelligent robot on its board of directors. Automated artificial intelligence, similarly, increasingly writes news stories. In March, a machine first broke the news of a Los Angeles earthquake, three minutes after the event.

According to the Oxford Martin School’s Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, 47 percent of U.S. jobs will be threatened by robotics and artificial intelligence in the next 20 years. While it is uncertain how society will deal with the potential economic earthquake, it appears certain that we can expect much more from our computers in the years to come.