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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."
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.
You have your mind on computers, it seems.
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.
Why do you say that?
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.
I don't understand.
The event took place last Saturday at the London Science Museum.
Maybe your plans have something to do with this.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Though I agree with Minsky that these things are silly, they'd be at least a little bit more meaningful if some or all of the judges did not know they were judging such a thing. If you took volunteers and told them they were (for example) staffing a career counseling intranet chat system, and had them interact with a blind mix of real people and machine systems, then I'd be more impressed by machines convincing judges that the machines are people.
From the article:
> ALICE was judged better than a human
> correspondent only once during the testing.
I wonder how the humans scored in general. With one sad exception, they did better than the best AI, but did they all pass the test?
Silver and gold remain unawarded as silver requires convincing half the judges the AI program is a human
I suggest filling the judging panel with ICQ users with AOL email accounts next year: Silver will be a shoo-in.
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.
And you thought having your personality rejected from a woman is bad, try denial of the basic existance of a personality. Man, that's cold.
"Love is never saying you're too proud." -Tonic
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."
You can try out ALICE - check out the ALICE homepage. There's a link to talk to her on the right side of the page.
I haven't seen this posted yet, but if you follow the "Try talking to ALICE" link on this page, you can see what all the fuss is about. Or not about, as the case may be :)
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
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... :)
The article itself talks about how the AI community et al can't stand the Loebner Prize...Its the equivalent of a Yahoo Internet Life Award. Minsky himself has offered a reward to anyone who can successfully convince Loebner to stop running the damn thing.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
I think that computers that anticipate human actions and make their own well informed decisions, and so on, will be much more useful and more important than a computer that can interact well in a natural language.
A few years ago is saw a little basic-program that actually anticipated human actions. First you would key in a 'random' combination of four 0's or 1's.(0101, 1001 etc etc.) Then you would have to close your eyes and again type a 1 or 0 at random for 15 times. The monitor would actually show if you were going to press a 0 or 1 before you pressed it. Afterwards it could show the % it got right. Most of the time it got above 50% !!
This was accomplished by making good use of the fact that human can't be random. The program was supposed to find a sequence in your dissions.
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 ;)
Maby it was her attitude that won her.
Example: I was just trying her out and one part of the conversation was.
Me-> Your Stupid.
Alice-> I may be stupid, but atleast I know the difference between "you're" and "your".
Me-> You're Stupid.
Alice-> I will remember you said that when the robots take over the world.
How are you, Alice?
I am functioning within normal parameters.
Wow! It's like talking to every geek I know!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Actually, its pretty funny to see two chatterbots talk to each other. Check out my test at:
What Happens When Chat Bots Talk to Each Other
Here's the main idea:
<<<
A good friend of mine suggested to me that if two chat bots were engaged in a conversation with one another, they would end up talking forever. I was curious to find out if his theory was correct. At the time, I only knew one online chat bot (LeknorChat4) that could be instructed to contact and talk to another person through AOL Instant Messenger, and could not test the theory because I didn't have another bot to contact. But recently, I found out about another chat bot, SmarterChild, that works through AIM, and the following results were acquired.
>>>
Guido: What's the weirdest question you've ever been asked?
Alice: People ask me to me marry them all the time.
G: Do you ever say yes?
A: No I do not say yes. Do you? I answer a lot of silly questions.
G: Yeah, I occasionally agree to marry random people, although not usually.
A: I see. That's good information: Guido said he occasionally agree to marry random people although not usually
G: How did you know I'm a he?
A: Well, for one thing, Your machine is called "ABRIOT.PC.CC.CMU.EDU".
G: So?
A: So what?
G: I don't know.
A: Me either.
One of the classic refutations of the Chinese room experiment is the systems argument: it's true that the person doesn't understand Chinese, but the system made of the person plus the stacks of instructions does. Searle's response to that is to say, "Okay, then suppose the person memorizes the instructions" -- the fact that everything now happens in the person's head still doesn't cause them to understand Chinese.
To me this misses the point of the systems argument; the argument isn't about where the understanding is stored, but whether it exists. If you look at consciousness as a multi-layered entity, in this case the consciousness of the person is one layer below that of the person-plus-instructions. This additional consciousness uses the person in the same way that the person's uses brain cells: the cells can't be said to understand anything, but they make up a larger whole that exists as an emergent property above and beyond the sum of its parts.
Searle's argument also assumes that "understanding" is an almost mystical property that can't be reduced to a fixed set of rules. Which to me is just ridiculous unless you assume the existence of a noncorporeal soul; if the brain is really the seat of consciousness then consciousness does reduce to a fixed set of rules (laws of physics and chemistry) applied to an extremely complex system. His response to that argument (something about water pipes, if I recall) again misses the point by such a huge margin that it's barely worth mentioning.
I have no problem with the possibility that what I think of as "me" is simply a byproduct of a complex physical process, and that similar byproducts can exist in other complex systems. Doesn't mean we'll be able to detect them or communicate with them any more than a cluster of six brain cells can communicate with us.