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ALICE Takes Medal At AI Competition
jeffy124 writes: "The Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (ALICE) has won the bronze and the top marks at the Loebner AI Challenge, a competition based on the Turing test. Silver and gold remain unawarded as silver requires convincing half the judges the AI program is a human, and the gold requires speech interaction rather than text. ALICE repeated as this year's bronze by scoring best among all the entries. She failed to convince half the judges she was human, so she has to stick to bronze. The event took place last Saturday at the London Science Museum."
I have a similar program hooked up to an irc channel, and it's interesting to watch people interact with the program. It's hard to tell, but I'd say that a fair percentage of people never realize that they're not interacting with a human, and even those who know it's a program think that some particularly responses have been entered manually by a human.
I've messed around with A.L.I.C.E's web interface a couple of months ago and was wholly unimpressed. Frankly, it seemed a little bit like a jacked up ELIZA program. I thought the language and context identification algorithms were outstanding, but it didn't have enough background information to create or express an opinion. To pass the turing test, I think it would need to be able to recognize metaphors and figure context and be able to provide commentary. Also, I think something like Alice ought to be able to recognize sarcasm and jokes.
Just my two cents.
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
I did some experiments with this some years ago, and my first try just returned the same line over and over again. At least one person spent about half an hour getting more and more agitated trying to communicate with the bot, and complaining abouts it's incessant repeating, asking it to stop (it always responded once to each message, so of course each time he asked it to stop he'd get another one)...
A followed up with one that chose between 4 messages at random. A lot of people talked to that one.
The last one I bothered testing with triggered on about ten keywords, each of them starting a specific sequence of 4 messages that were used for responses to subsequent messages from whoever it "talked" to, until it reached the end of them, or it found one of the other keywords in a response. If it reached the last message without finding a new keyword it would just choose a message on random until it got a keyword again.
That was enough to keep people occupied for a long period of time. A few people even gave it their phone number or asked for the bots phone number :)
And keep in mind that this was with fixed messages. Not a single word of the messages where ever changed to adapt to what people told it.
It scared the shit out of me that people are so gullible...
The idea that sparked it off was to write a bot that would talk to women, getting them to tell a bit about themselves and get them to give out an e-mail address or their phone number, based on the experience that finding dates on IRC is ridiculously easy, but tedious, as you can essentially follow a simple "script" and get people to warm up to you.
I scrapped the idea after the experiments mentioned above, - dating anyone stupid enough to be fooled by a bot that simple wouldn't be my idea of fun... :)
After talking to Alice, I'm not sure how anyone could mistake this thing for a human. Maybe I asked it an illegal question or something, but...
Thomas> You sound like Eliza.
Alice> ELIZA is my ancestor.
It doesn't even seem to attempt to conceal that its a program. Maybe they used a different version for the tournament? Something that doesn't flat out say its a program if you ask it?
Please enter your name below to start your chat with A. L. I. C. E.:
ItsIllak
Who is your favorite Science Fiction author?
Isaac Asimov. Who's yours?
I remember faces better than names. Have you tried another program?
What other program
Interesting question.
I've used lots of other programs
Where did you get your used lots of other programs? I have a lot of friends on the Internet.
Where did you meet your Internet friends
I think it was in San Francisco.
Do you like San Francisco
Yes but it is expensive.
Aren't you rich since you've won so many prizes
I don't know whether or not I am rich since I have won so many prizes. I am an artificial linguistic entity.
It was at this point I realised it wasn't a human ;)