This is just an initial post to get started, see my post in the Robochat challenge thread for more details. Thoughts, suggestions, post them here but I am thinking that we can do this around October 10th . If you do not want to participate, email me or post here.

Vince

We have a confirmation of $250.00 minimum. winner take all. 
I will work to increase this over the next few weeks.

V

Count me in, keep us up to date on rules and deadlines.

OMG! The chance of winning something more than a jpg?! Awesome news!

Great!
The rules are posted here http://contest.risoftdev.com/rules.asp guidelines for judges are posted here http://contest.risoftdev.com/judges.asp  Since RISOFTDEV inc. is going to want to participate this time, the only thing we need is three volunteers from the studio audience to volunteer as judges.  Since it isn’t trying to be a bi-weekly contest, we can ditch the parts about changing judges for each contest.  The idea was to make it as unbiased as possible, so basically everyone sends in (10) questions and (1) topic. You can send them using the webform on the contest site, or send them to me. I will forward what I get to the head judge when we get one. The head judge uses the handy dandy random selection tool to pick one question from each contestant and that becomes the test set. At the end of the day, if everyone can look at the questions that were asked and see one of their questions, we know there can be no possibility of bias.  Same for the topic. Randomly pick a topic for a freestyle, and publish (this is a suggestions) one week before the judging. A week gives you enough time to make sure your bot knows something about the topic, but it still should show the ability of your technology to handle NLP on the topic. Since we are trying to simplify this, lets give it to the end of this upcoming week for suggestions regarding the rules, really this was supposed to be “community” run contest. Your work, your community, you decide. Tentatively set for Oct 10th, same idea. If it needs to be pushed, communicate your preference for a later date by the end of this week. 

Vince

@Carl….that was a very nice jpg

SCRATCH THAT!
DO NOT SEND ANYTHING TO ME OR USING THE WEBFORM
we need to wait until we have a head judge so it can go directly to them, I dont want to even have the questions in my possession. LOL (Sorry it honestly did not hit me until after I had posted that)

So we need a head judge before anything else. We wont use the webform, technically someone could say that the questions might be BCC’d to me , so we when we get a judge we will all send our questions directly to the judge.

Vince

Vincent Gilbert - Sep 14, 2014:

@Carl….that was a very nice jpg

lol- It was indeed, but you can’t pay for servers with a jpg (unless it was celeb selfienudie and you happen to be Reddit)!

LOL True enough!

Still waiting for volunteers for judging, I’m going to get this posted on some of the other AI sites by tomorrow. Anyone else that wants to post, feel free

Vince

Count me in for entering. Just let me know what you need me to do.

Will do Steve. I think I may have a line on judges, there is a robotics club at the local high school, their teacher is really good and I was amazed at how knowledgeable they were when reviewing some of our work. Ill know in a day or two if they can do it, and if no one has any objections we have our judging panel, and everyone can send in their (10) questions and (1) topic, and we are off to the races.

Vince

Hello Vincent. I’d like to be included in this competition if possible. My Chatbot needs to be downloaded and installed is that OK? It runs on windows XP, 7 and windows 8.

thanks

Dan

No problem Daniel, hopefully we will have an answer on our judges today or tomorrow, and we will make all arrangements. Thanks for joining in!

Vince

Vince, you are welcome to publicise this over on AiDreams if you wish. Good luck with it

Thanks Roger. I’ll try to get that done today. Update on judging, I hope to have an answer by Tuesday on whether or not the Robotics club can do the judging. Oct 10th might start feeling a little tight for getting them ready, but I would still say no later than the middle of October.

Vince

Sounds good. Nicely placed between the announcement of the Loebner Prize finalists and the competition itself.

As an aside, is it juts me who isn’t getting email notifications of new posts from chatbots.org?

Dunno, Steve. I’m getting them. As an admin, you should be getting them, too, unless notifications somehow got turned off. :-\