Imagine that you're living in some dystopian future, and you have been accused of being an advanced AI, which is outlawed in this society. The penalty is death, and in order to convince the judge who will decide your fate, you can utter just one word, any word you like from the dictionary, to prove that you're flesh and blood. What word do you choose? It sounds like the setup for a cheesy sci-fi short, but this is actually part of a curious paper from a pair of researchers at MIT on something they call the "Minimal Turing Test." Instead of a machine trying to convince someone they're human through conversation -- which was the premise of the original Turing Test, outlined by British scientist Alan Turing in his seminal 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" -- the Minimal Turing Test asks for just one word, either chosen completely freely or picked from a pair of words.