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2006 Chatterbox Challenge In Full Swing
William Wynn writes "Once again chatterbots from around the world are coming together to face off in the ultimate bot competition. The 2006 Chatterbox Challenge lays host to 65 artificially intelligent programs attempting to imitate human conversation. Public voting takes place from April 1 to April 30 after which the private judging will have been finished and medals and cash prizes will be given out. Medals are awarded for "Most Popular Bot," "Best Learning Bot" and "Best New Bot" as well as $1,800 to be split among the top three bots overall. Anyone can talk to the competing chatbots through the competition website."
Perry, I have something to tell you. Remember that philosophy class you took...
The way to train AI is to let it grow up as a human.
A true AI needs to understand the context, and acquire new knowledge from it.
But the day someone can successfully implement chatterbots will be the day we can have robot maids asking us what we want for dinner, or asking us if we had problems at the job.
AI will not be learned by playing with some limitted 3rd party app. However, in my opinion, the first person to combine quality natural language processing with the wealth of data which can be spidered on the Internet will be the first to create a truly "intelligent" machine.
It may be because both of my parents were lawyers (and you thought your childhood was traumatic), but I am not impressed with these spans-of-ELIZA which do little more than regurgetate.
Anyone else around these parts working on some web-based AI projects? If so, I for one would love to see them. Also, I found that this book was exceptionally useful to me (nope, no commission tag- check for yourself ;))
Finally, for anyone using PHP who thinks that AI is waaaay out of their league:
The way I see it, we'll *all* be enslaved to the machines sooner or later. May as well join the "winning team". (I kid, I kid!).
Math is math. Regular expression is regular expression. The tools are there. The future is now.
I see. Tell me more about these bots that bug you.
Daggonit, I was also going to add some details about how awesome a game it was.
The neat thing about the game is that you are about to take trips into a 'virtual reality' that was a progression of simulations into the future. At first, everything is good, but as you jump farther into the future, things turn very very bad. There are a set of politicians depending on your predictions to decide whether or not to go forward with a certain policy. Since the policy is good in the short-term, they start to go ahead with it. However, as you find out how terrible the future is going to be, you have to find a way to stop the,
I felt the game was very good at making you care about the characters in the 'virtual reality', even though they were only a part of the 'game within the game'.
Anyways, it's avaiable for download at abandonware type sites...I'd recommend it...
Everything I need to know about copyrights I learned from Slashdot.
I'm really disappointed in this. Should this article have been dated April 1st? I sampled 10 bots. None of them could do simple math. None could locate or supply any information about major cities. In fact, I didn't get a single serious or correct answer to any of 40-50 questions. Each of the 10 I sampled simply responds with "joke" answers ('why do you want to know?') or paraphrases "I do not understand the question". The Eliza program from the 1970s clearly does a much better job. If this is a joke, it's in poor taste, as I assume there must be people somewhere doing actual research on conversing bots.