Turing test and all it's connotative baggage aside, the first chatbot that will impress me is the one where I can't for the life of me figure out how it's creating the responses it is.
Absolutely. Responses like Eugene's seem straight out of the "Eliza" program I typed into my home computer (out of a magazine) in the mid 1980s. If Eugene is the new state of the art, as some have claimed, it doesn't seem that there has been any progress at all in the last 30 years.
Perhaps next year the test will be won by Ham Hamuelson, an AI persona who managed to convince the judges that he was a talking ham sandwich. I guess we can't completely rule that out.
"Eugene", I can imagine creating when I was 12.