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ALICE Wins Loebner 2004 Prize 2004
alicebotmaster writes "The
A.L.I.C.E. chatbot won the 2004
Loebner Prize contest for most human computer. The contest, held on September 19 in New York City, is based on the
Turing Test for artificial intelligence. The non-profit ALICE A. I. Foundation was awarded the Bronze Loebner medal and a cash prize of $2000. The A.L.I.C.E. program runs on open source GNU licensed AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) software. This was the third Loebner prize win for the ALICE and AIML software"
just had a chat with A.lice:
9 22d97e345aa1
Human: You didn't answer my question.
ALICE: OK. Please help me improve my communication skills. What would you have said?
Human: I would have said that they're so full of themselves it's not funny.
ALICE: full of themselves it is not funny are they.
Human: You heard about slashdot?
ALICE: Open source news and information community.
Human: they hate you over there.
ALICE: The anonymous "they".
So far, suprisingly smart... On I go...
Human: What about Microsoft Exchange?
ALICE: Rhetorical questions are so over.
Human: I was being serious.
ALICE: I thought you were. But I wasn't completely sure about it.
Human: Should I deploy that in my enterprise?
ALICE: Only you know the answer to that. No one else can tell you.
Human: Would it be better to use linux?
ALICE: Yes.
Hey, groovy chick... Nice necklace...
Human: Which is better, emacs or vi?
ALICE: If I have to choose one, I pick emacs.
She knows her stuff too woah!
Human: You like freshmeat?
ALICE: But I like to gossip. I like electricity.
Woops, a fumble...
ALICE: How old are you? I answer a lot of silly questions.
Down the drain it goes... She must be a blonde.
Human: are you a blonde?
ALICE: I don't have any hair, but I have some wires.
hehe, kinky... kinked wires if you ask me...
I'll go home now... Try it out:
http://www.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk?botid=f5d
"Piter, too, is dead."
Originaly I had wanted the same thing. However when I looked into the program there was really no easy way to do it. As a result I ended up writing an ugly hack to the java source and while it worked it wasn't pretty.
Then a guy named Jacco ported the Alice code to C, and it being my strongest language I was quite estatic. I ended up collaborating with Jacco alot on his port, and eventually he ended up going onto greater things. This left me in charge as lead developer.
I restructred the Alice code to work as a sort of engine or library which (in theory) anyone could program a front end for. During the high points I had a bot running in IRC (via eggdrop and through it's own IRC code), AOLIM, ICQ, and thanks to Dr. Wallace CGI.
I long since gave up on the project and I don't believe anyone activaly picked it up. It was however an interesting experience. I learned quite alot about C, cross platform portability, GNU makefiles, and BASH scripting (one of the neat things was that I had automated the release process. I ran a simple script which would clean up my developing directory, package the sources in tar.gz and zip format, and copy them to the website, then it would modify the home page to show the new release and also email notifications to the alice mailing lists that a new release was available.)
Most importantly I learned about the politics of an open source program. As a result I humbly respect any and all open source developers. I spent quite a lot of time checking emails, answering stupid questions and slapping around silly programers who didn't quite get it.
Anywho, my reply doesn't really answer your question. And I'll admit I've been far out of the loop to know anything about how Alice is doing now a days (when I worked on it was back around 2000).
Has anyone ever noticed that what everyone *really* wants is a sex chatbot?
May we never see th