Improvised Comedy as a Turing Test
  The best improvisational theatre actors can make any scene partner, of any
skill level or ability, appear talented and proficient in the art form, and
thus "make them shine". To challenge this improvisational paradigm, we built an
artificial intelligence (AI) trained to perform live shows alongside human
actors for human audiences. Over the course of 30 performances to a combined
audience of almost 3000 people, we have refined theatrical games which involve
combinations of human and (at times, adversarial) AI actors. We have developed
specific scene structures to include audience participants in interesting ways.
Finally, we developed a complete show structure that submitted the audience to
a Turing test and observed their suspension of disbelief, which we believe is
key for human/non-human theatre co-creation.
