Thanks for the link. I had similar thoughts to the original downvoted commenter. I talked to one of the various IM bots in 2006, and they've been around a lot longer than that, and I thought that apart from its constant advertising to me it was remarkably human-like especially when it sometimes used 'u' instead of 'you'. If it had more processing power and memory, a better memory, and didn't have a goal of making money through advertising, I thought back then it had a decent chance at fooling humans.

That's all the Turing Test is, it's fooling humans, and humans are incredibly easy to fool--you don't need human level intelligence to fool one. Just several months ago I only realized that a response I got on a craigslist posting was made by a bot after I replied and it replied back with an almost word-for-word copy of its original message (and urged me to fill out a form of personal info). Simple hacks like avoiding repeating the same things, remembering information shared to whom and to you from whom, and the occasional intentional grammatical error go a long way to trick the human. I think we could have had multiple Turing Test passes over the past couple years if that was actually an important goal. But I think most people in AI realize there are more interesting problems to work on than AI PR so projects like CleverBot aren't given top priority.