September 24, 2004
“Um, Who is saying me won the LOEBNER PRIZE?”
For the third time in the past five years, the chatterbot ALICE has scored highest and won the Bronze at the annual Loebner Prize competition, held this week in New York City. Jabberwacky came in second place.
We’ve discussed ALICE, Jabberwacky and the Loebner competition a couple of times on GTxA (1 2).
September 24th, 2004 at 10:03 pm
Anyone who has ever looked at the transcripts for the Loebner contest cannot be impressed by the quality of the entrants. As the linked-to article suggests, the winning entry was little more than a hugely complex set of if-then statements. It can’t learn or express novel or creative thoughts, and so it is trivial to show-up such a program.
September 27th, 2004 at 11:13 am
Dear Anonymous,
Well, in link #2 above, the essay “Unconscious Thinking”, I argued that the level of capability of ALICE, as you say, “a hugely complex set of if-then statements”, should be considered a form of knowledge representation and intelligence, but at a lower, perhaps “unconscious” level of thinking, not a higher-level, deliberate, “conscious” one. Approaches like ALICE cannot and should not be merely dismissed as “faking it”; that’s an overly simplistic take on the question, “what is intelligence”.