Turing Assessment Period (TAP)

The Turing Assessment Period (also known as TAP) refers to a specific period of time in which a subdivision of Nintendo known as the "Temporal Disturbances Committee" (at the time known as the "Mario Club"), conducted a series of experiments with the goal of assessing the degree of sentience Super Mario 64's AI possesses.

The term was coined by journalists who investigated the development of Super Mario 64 and released classified documents that include references to these events, it is currently unknown what the experiments are/were internally referred to by Nintendo or whether the leaked documentation is fake or not. The experiments themselves are a variation of the infamous "Turing Test" and would supposedly at first consist of Nintendo staff using the Nintendo 64 microphone hardware add-on in an attempt to communicate with the game's AI. Another, unknown add-on was utilized to record the frequencies given off by the Nintendo 64 used.

These frequencies were then analyzed and interpreted by the staff, who would then read the interpretations to the test subjects. The participants would not know if the answer they received was from the game or a staff member, as they were not allowed to see the recorded frequencies themselves. The participants were instructed to ask increasingly more complex questions and write down the answers they received, after which they would have been asked to assess which of them were fabricated by the staff and which ones were replies by the AI. The staff would also let a pink noise play at 4 decibels while the experiments went on, the reasons for this are unknown. Those trials were reportedly conducted at a very early stage of the AI's development and their results aren't clear to this day.

As time progressed and a build of the game now known as the "1995/07/29 build" had been developed, the experiments already had gotten to a point where only higher-ups at Nintendo were allowed to know about them, while the staff that previously worked with the Mario Club were told that the experiments had concluded and lead to no worthwhile results. The tests were now supposedly based around the consumption of very high doses of psychedelic drugs, theorized to be either ibogain or lysergic acid diethylamide, by the unknowing test subjects.

The revised experiments were reportedly conducted inside a small, windowless room monitored by cameras, according to the leaked documents in an attempt to boost their receptiveness. The test subjects were reportedly told to just playtest the game themselves, while reporting their emotions and feelings to the staff over a microphone. While the experiments were happening, the subjects were supposedly stammering short, incoherent sentences while staring at the game's title screen in a sort of trance. Not in one instance would the subject press the start button to get past it, even when implored to.

The results can simply be blamed on the drug's effects, severe emotional trauma and/or drug induced psychosis. However, the participants reported that they suffered from vivid nightmares involving Super Mario 64 even months after the experiments were conducted. The most common retelling of a nightmare involved Mario's head in the title screen slowly but surely metamorphosizing into the face of a young, asian woman. The woman would then stare directly at them with wide open eyes while calmly speaking an unidentifiable language too fast for them to understand, in a manner that had been described as overwhelming and unnerving. Most subjects were certain to have seen the woman before, but weren't able to give a more detailed description of her appearance.

The latest of the leaked documents is dated 1996/04/14 and featured two paragraphs, one thanking the staff and ensuring them that they wrote history and people would look back at their achievements in awe, while the other one is specifically thanking an unidentified person with the initials "T.L.".