[Interference]

Any day now.

All right, maybe not next Wednesday, but mimicking the process of reactive thought and conversation is achievable (I, myself, have been called a mechanical beast, but that, I feel, is a story for another day). A computer might already be said to think, though it can not as yet make independently arrived-at choices - like the selection of particular and appropriate words, for example. But that's the basis of conversation. We often use familiar turns of phrase to respond to familiar sounds or experiences. Key words might trigger key responses in an automaton. (Unfortunately, I can remember a sequence in an episode of the Six Million Dollar Man where Steve Austen caught out the robot played by John Saxon because the robot's automatic response came up with an exact phrase and an exact inflection twice in reply).

Making a bi-pedal creature with arms, hands and a head is a question of weight/balance/bald-or-hirsuit. Achievable, why wouldn't it be?

Teaching a robot to type ... hmmm. Tricky.

If that's all it would take to win the prize, I'd say it could happen within the next five years easily if anyone were to put their mind to it. The question is one of desirability. The robots we need aren't an average height of six feet with a limited number of appendages and digits, a paltry pair of eyes and an orifice for sniffles. We need robot arms as limb replacements, robot spanners in construction, robot cockroaches for space exploration, we need something better than an android.

Secondly, who would want an android?

I: Do you know how long it was between the manufacture of rubber products and the first blow-up woman?

II: Can you imagine anything more eery than a mechanical butler that can switch itself off and stand in a corner? Would you, however logically you might know that it was simply a programmable machine, trust one with your children? Or your laundry? Or cooking?

III: Who could/would pay for the luxury of a robot that looks and acts human when you can have a robot that looks like nothing more than a meccano set that you won't feel you need to apologise to if you accidentally kick it?

Robots that seem alive will be unpopular.

But that wasn't your question, the answer to which is really that we already have the technology, but the prize isn't worth it - when we can get one elected President of the U.S. and get it to say and do anything we damned well please (... and you try to warn people, and they just don't believe you ... Look at its eyes! LOOK AT ITS EYES!!!)