Eugene has actually been around for many years, since 2008 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_Prize), and at that time he convinced one of 12 judges in a parallel test. One of the judges found him more human than an actual human conversation partner.

People keep saying the test is bad, but I feel the standards are very high already. You have to fool a human judge who is on the lookout for a bot. Based on the news articles, it's not clear if Eugene competed against a human partner in side-by-side conversations, but since they're so insistent about the "true" Turing test I'd guess he did. The ability to fool an unsuspecting judge has been around since AIM bots.