September 16, 2005
It’s That Time of Year Again
Time to award another Loebner prize — an annual formal instantiation of the Turing Test, now in its 15th year. This year’s final four contestants are:
ALICE Silver Edition, botmaster Richard Wallace et al (previous winner in 2004, 2001, 2000)
Eugene Goostman, botmaster Vladimir Veselov
Jabberwacky, botmaster Rollo Carpenter
Toni, botmaster Steven Watkins
The contest will be held this Sunday from 10am to 4pm, at 220 W. 98th St #2B, New York, NY (is that someone’s apartment?). Assuming no contestant makes it beyond the Bronze medal stage (none have in the past, I believe), $3000 will be awarded; however the $25,000 Silver Medal “will be at risk” this year, according to the rules explaining the scoring system.
Good luck to all the bots and their botmasters!
(If it seems like I’m teasing this contest, it’s a little bit true, but I think it’s cool and good to have around as a carrot to build better bots. :-)
The prize is sponsored by Crown Industries of New Jersey, makers of aluminum and solid brass display easels, pipes, drapes, brass fittings and more.
September 17th, 2005 at 2:39 pm
[…] e from that of a human,the computer could be said to be thinking. Originally blogged on Grand Text Auto This entry was […]
September 19th, 2005 at 4:54 am
Rollo Carpenter’s chatbot Jabberwacky – more precisely, the Jabberwacky character known as George – has won the Loebner Prize 2005 yesterday. Carpenter, a Brit, has been working up to his success by gaining third place in the 2003 and second place in the 2004 competitions.
September 20th, 2005 at 1:50 pm
Here’s a BBC article about George.
September 21st, 2005 at 4:19 pm
A preliminary listing of the 2005 Loebner Prize transcripts can be found here
The detailed scores are here
A video of the contest can be downloaded here; the file size is 28.6 Mb.
The next Loebner Prize contest will be held Sunday, Oct 1, 2006.
This was the first contest where the programmers of all four bots that made the finals where present on location. Hugh Loebner obviously liked this, so he made it a requirement that next year, the final four contestants or their representative(s) must be present and supervise their entries during the contest. To underwrite expenses, he’ll award a stipend of USD 250 to each of them.
September 23rd, 2005 at 4:57 am
For those interested, this might be a fitting time to join Robitron, a discussion group dedicated to Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, chatterbots, and Android Software, which is hosted by two-time Loebner Prize winner Robby Garner. Post-contest, a lively discussion has errupted regarding the future development of bots and what the “best” strategy/architecture might be (Pattern matching + authoring? Pattern matching + conversational learning? Kohonen Maps? Models of subcognitive substrates? Hypnosis?). Besides Garner himself, all four of this year’s finalists, Kevin Copple (another Bronze medal winner), Hugh Loebner, and a whole slew of other knowledgable people are participating.
In other news, the conspiracy theorists have discovered the Alice chatbot…