I understood that, I just found sentences like "The player was able to verbally chat with our representative during play, while continuing to play." amusing. As if him being unable to chat might have indicated failure of the Turing test.
The conversation test may have been to establish the the player wasn't blindly following instructions from a robot. Holding a conversation with the investigators would at least make it difficult to follow surreptitious advice.
The point, though, was to prove the computers weren't playing automatically and that the human was the one actually making decisions - the computers were just helping with the manual non-strategic aspects of running that many games at once.
