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It’s an interesting fact that despite Elbot’s successes in numerous artificial intelligence competitions it was never the intention that people would mistake him as a human, after all he does claim to be a robot. Behind the sarcastic chatterbot lies a variety of social psychological theories that provokes the user to act predictably, creating not just a very different chat experience, but one where the human believes that they are in control.

MyCyberTwin, a new generation of artificial intelligence technology, today announced the launch of its Turing Test Challenge. The contest gives developers the needed tools and instruction to leverage MyCybertwin’s AI Platform to build intelligent virtual agents (IVA’s) and compete head-to-head with other developer agents.

Wikipedia defines the ‘Turing Test’ as a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior. It was first introduced by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence highlighting the ability for machines to think. 

“Developers love working with new technology platforms. They are constantly looking for state-of-the-art products and services they can perfect,” said Liesl Capper, CEO. “Thanks to the inspirational work by the likes of Alan Turing, and the recent launch of Siri, today artificial intelligence is ready for prime time and quickly be adopted by businesses.  The ‘Turing Test Challenge’ allows developer to take advantage of MyCyberTwin’s AI solutions to build virtual agents to compete against other developers. Since creating this concept, the response we have already gotten is tremendous.  We are extremely excited to see what happens when developers get their hands on our technology.” 

Look carefully at the scene presented on the picture below:

If somebody asked you a question: “Where is the coffee cup?”, you could give a simple answer: “on the mat’. But you could also say “to the left of the lamp” as well as “on the table”. All those answers are correct, although they require several subjective and nuanced judgements which we - humans - do intuitively. What about chatbots?

My chatbot, Suzette, won this year’s Loebner Prize contest and even confused a judge into voting for her over a human (or should I say he confused himself). But here is the blow-by-blow of this weird event.

When I arrived at the contest, I figured I had good odds to win if nothing went horribly wrong. Yes, Suzette had easily qualified over the 3 other competitors (her score 11 pts, the nearest competitor 7.5). Her design and data naturally gave her an edge over her competitors on the human knowledge test questions of the qualifiers. But human judge chat was an entirely different matter than the qualification test. Still, I felt she could carry on a detailed conversation better than the others and should win.

Initial installation of the programs occurred on Friday. From prechat conversations with the other contestants I learned that A.L.I.C.E. came with 3 redundant disks. Yet all three turned out to be blank! What a scare that must have been. Dr Wallace managed to install by retrieving the program over the Internet. Cleverbot is now at 45 million lines of memorized user chat (at a rate of doubling every year). And UltraHal is now listening to tweets, so has 300K of user chat it learned and 400K of tweets it has accepted for learning (code decides if the user has had enough responses and doesn’t trigger any red flags).

In this open-hearted interview, Hugh Loebner, initiator of the very first Turing Test 20 years ago, talks about how it all began, about the future of this competition, and about his personal involvement. He also talks about his renowned protocol which is generally regarded as quite annoying, and always a topic of discussion.

The video was shot during the last Loebner Prize Contest in Brighton last year. The 2010 Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence will be held on Saturday 23 October 2010 at California State University, Los Angeles, USA.
The 2010 competition will mark the 20th edition of this contest. See for more information:
https://www.chatbots.org/awards/loebner_prize/year_2010/

The Chatterbox Challenge (CBC) is an annual contest which starts in mid March that allow any chatbot developer to participate and evaluate the intelligence of the chatbot through turing tests and much more. It is a really fun, simple and inclusive way for all children to practise their speech and language skills, it will be also interesting and amazing for anyone who wants to chat with the best chatbots.

Ever wondered how the Loebner Prize Contest -the ‘First Turing Test’- actually takes place? Well, find out for yourself, this is a video report I’ve shot in Brighton, United Kingdom, on Sunday Morning Sept 6th, 2009:

Details after the break.

Congratulations to David Levy, winner of the Loebner Prize 2009 for “most human computer”. The contest was held September 6, 2009 in Brighton, UK.

This year the contest drew only three finalists. In addition to Mr. Levy’s program, the competitors included previous (two-time) Loebner winner Rollo Carpenter and newcomer Mohan Embar.

Those entering online dating forums risk having more than their hearts stolen. A program that can mimic online flirtation and then extract personal information from its unsuspecting conversation partners is making the rounds in Russian chat forums, according to security software firm PC Tools.