Uncyclopedia:Featured articles/February 10

The Turing Duck Test is an assay developed by Alan Turing (1912-1954) to determine whether a subject is a human or a duck. Turing, though most famous for his eponymous Turing Test, a procedure to determine whether a subject is a man or a robot, actually devised dozens of experiments to determine whether people are, in fact, human beings. While the Turing Duck Test is rarely employed today, it did give rise to the often-misattributed Turing Hypothesis: "If it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck."

In the autumn of 1949, Turing devised an experiment to determine the validity of his hypothesis. He decided that his experiment must be double-blind, meaning that neither the experimenters nor the subjects knew they were taking place in an experiment. To that end, Turing recruited two subjects - Jeremy Robin, a first year student at Cambridge University, and "Paco," a white duck from a local pond - in such a way that neither had any idea they were being experimented upon. He also recruited a student from the Cambridge Psychology Department to make simple observations, with the instruction that they must include no references to humans or ducks. (Full article...)