As already mentioned, Markov chains were already used in practice as (poor) Turing tests (IMHO working best in art projects, and sadly, spam).

Sure, today's LLMs blow them out of the water, but the difference was much less striking with neural networks even as late as 2010.

That’s interesting you put the date at 2010! When I learned machine learning in ~2016-2018, markov chains were THE fundamental problem tool of NLP still. Neural networks were all the rage ofc, but still… could you tell me what tech/change you’re thinking of?

For example, I remember /r/SubredditSimulator blowing my mind, and I’m pretty sure that was markov chains

Yeah, my bad, I took a guess here, from what I remember about when neural networks became the hot buzzword (again, after the 1970's Perceptron ?) - sounds like I missed, since the transition was slower than I thought ?

P.S.: "2010" was probably from this great Ars Technica article :

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/skynet-meets-the-swar...

It's not clear to me whether neural networks were already involved (though there's already some self-learning there), you can see a few Ars and YouTube comments mentioning them, though "genetic algorithms" seems to also have been a popular buzzword ?

P.P.S.: This is about StarCraft 1 (ONE), not to be confused with DeepMind's Alpha Star wiping the floor with a pro StarCraft 2 (TWO) player in 2018.