1) Two amateurs from New Hampshire (a database administrator and a soccer coach) won a recent international "freestyle" chess tournament, which included several grandmasters. Freestyle chess is team competition, including both humans and computers. The winning team (ZackS, anonymous throughout the tournament) used ordinary PCs and commercial chess software. Nevertheless, their play was so spectacular that many suspected the presence of Gary Kasparov!
The other untitled team, ZackS, is a dark horse. The identity of the people behind this team, and the method they are using, will be revealed after the tournament is over. Everybody assumes that there are one or more GMs working together with the team captain. The rumour was that Garry Kasparov was producing the extraordinary chess displayed by ZackS, but we can confirm that on the weekend of the quarter-finals Kasparov was most certainly otherwise engaged.
The standard of play is very high, possibly the highest ever seen in chess at these time controls. One would scarcely expect a human player, even the best in the world, to be able to face the precision and the strategic depth of some of the participants in this event.
2) An AI program has matched the average human performance on the verbal analogies portion of the SAT. (You know, "fish is to sea as monkey is to ...?") This is far short of passing the Turing test, but still an impressive feat of extracting relations from computer analysis of a terabyte of text. The program was written by Peter D. Turney's Interactive Information Group, Institute for Information Technology of the National Research Council Canada.
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I suspect that truly advanced aliens, if sufficiently motivated, could imitate humans to some degree. Even more important, they could convince us that they have the ability to learn new concepts and use them in reasoning, which is I think the real content of the Turing test. (No intelligence which is unable to learn from a converstion, and demonstrate an improved understanding, could ever pass the Turing test.)
You might be interested in Eric Baum's perspective on AI, as described in his book "What is Thought?" Baum believes that evolution has compressed a huge amount of information in the structure of our brains (and genes), a process that AI would have to somehow replicate. If Baum is right, we would have a lot more in common with aliens (whose brains are the result of an analogous evolutionary process) than we do with the current generation of "thinking" machines.
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