Dragon is one of the most famous heroes around. She seems to be some sort of exception along many axes: she has managed to replicate and improve on other tinkers' designs, in addition to having produced numerous and varied enough other advances that no one really knows what her specialty is. Amongst her more notable inventions are the containment foam and the Birdcage, but she's optimised and streamlined many of the technologies currently in use by the PRT and the Protectorate, and lots of other mass produced advanced technology came from her advances.
On a more personal note, she was in Newfoundland when Leviathan sunk it and got agoraphobia as a trauma response, so she never actually goes out herself to do any heroics, and currently lives in some secret location in Canada. This impairs her less than it would most people due to the advanced robotic extensions that she sometimes uses to participate more physically in activities as well as her online presence everywhere. It's also speculated (but not officially confirmed) that she's one of those capes that doesn't need to sleep, which helps her be as productive as she is.
The Turing test far predates parahumans and was first suggested by a mathematical genius called Alan Turing. He made a somewhat sexist analogy back when the idea was published as a paper in the fifties, and there have been different interpretations over the years about how best to implement the spirit of it, but the general idea is that the AI and a human will communicate with another human who will be the "judge", and the judge has to fail to reliably identify which is which. More recently, in efforts spearheaded by Dragon and the Guild, the test has been formalized and enshrined into law, such that any being who passes it will be legally recognized as a citizen of whichever country they're in when they take the test (if the country has agreed to the International Treaty on Artificial Intelligences), and so will have the same rights and duties as a normal human citizen, plus anything else implied by whatever parahuman-like abilities they might have.
The formal version of the test has three stages:
- The first stage is a live interview with the AI in which a psychological profile is created.
- For the second stage, five human volunteers with similar psychological profiles must be found and then vetted by the AI themself. Response time per subject is also recorded at this stage.
- Finally, the five humans and the AI are separated into different electronically isolated rooms with access only to a text terminal which they will use to talk to a sixth human who has never met the AI or the other humans. Everyone's responses will be delayed to match the slowest volunteer's so that the judge cannot use that to infer anything, and they will converse in six one-on-one chat windows as well as one group conversation with all seven people, for four hours.
Participants are prohibited from accusing anyone else of being the AI or trying to infer each other's identities, and the chat logs are reviewed afterwards to verify this. The judge will give their current probability that each participant is the AI every half an hour, as well as a final best guess at the end plus a justification for their answer. If they give more than 75% probability that the AI is the AI in five out of the seven intermediate estimates, the final best guess is higher than 95% chance that the AI is who they are, or the AI gets the highest probabilities in all eight estimates, the AI fails; otherwise, they pass.
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