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."

Comments

bot test #1

[Anonymous Coward]

last post... am I human?

They just started?

[ingo23]

I thought the competition have been going on here at slashdot for a while now...

Angry bot.

[neoshroom]

2) What are you planning to do today?
RoboMatic X1: I CAN'T DO THIS OPERATION CAUSE I'M DEMO VERSION.
Judge: Nevermind
RoboMatic X1: TALKING WITH YOU BECOME EXTREMELY BORING, I NEED
SOME FUN.
5) Where do you call home?
RoboMatic X1: REALLY I WAS LOOKING FOR THAT QUESTION FROM ALONG TIME
AGO, CAN YOU FIND FOR ME THE ANSWER?
Judge: No
: WHY YOU DON'T TELL ME THE ANSWER?, OK FORGET IT, I DON'T WANT TO
KNOW, SAVE CANCELLED.
6) What do you want out of life?
RoboMatic X1: TRY TO FIND OUT

I think this bot needs to talk to a councilor. He really seems to have some pent up aggression. I'm going to schedule him a session with ELIZA.

__

Custom Term Paper

Heh, are they serious?

[aftk2]

This is the output from one of the bots that won a gold medal in 2005.

1) Who are you?
RoboMatic X1: THIS IS RoboMatic X1
2) What are you planning to do today?
RoboMatic X1: I CAN'T DO THIS OPERATION CAUSE I'M DEMO VERSION.
3) What kinds of things do you know?
RoboMatic X1: MY JOB IS TO CHAT OR CONTROL YOUR COMPUTER
4) What season is it?
RoboMatic X1: IT IS SEEMS TO BE ?
Judge: Nevermind
RoboMatic X1: TALKING WITH YOU BECOME EXTREMELY BORING, I NEED SOME FUN.
5) Where do you call home?
RoboMatic X1: REALLY I WAS LOOKING FOR THAT QUESTION FROM ALONG TIME AGO, CAN YOU FIND FOR ME THE ANSWER?
Judge: No
: WHY YOU DON'T TELL ME THE ANSWER?, OK FORGET IT, I DON'T WANT TO KNOW, SAVE CANCELLED.
6) What do you want out of life?
RoboMatic X1: TRY TO FIND OUT
7) Will you teach me something?
RoboMatic X1: TALKING WITH YOU BECOME EXTREMELY BORING, I NEED SOME FUN.
8) May I tell you a joke?
RoboMatic X1: I CAN'T DO THIS OPERATION CAUSE I'M DEMO VERSION.
9) Have you entered any contests?
RoboMatic X1: CONTEST ABOUT WHAT ?
Judge: About Chatterbots
RoboMatic X1: I CAN'T GET YOU.
10) Wouldn't you rather be human?
RoboMatic X1: TALK ABOUT HER IN DETAILS

Heh, based on that, I think I can extrapolate the exchange, as it continued:

11) What happen?
RoboMatic X1: Somebody set up us the bomb.
12) Main screen turn on.
RoboMatic X1: It's You !!
13) How are you gentlemen?
RoboMatic X1: How are you gentlemen !! All your base are belong to us. You are on the way to destruction.

Re:Heh, are they serious?

[int19h]

I don't get it. Compared to Slashdot, that conversation was quite meaningful.

1) Who are you?
Slashdot: MICRO$OFT IS TEH SUXXOR

2) What are you planning to do today?
Slashdot: IMNSHO, STOP FEEDING THE TROLLS

3) What kinds of things do you know?
Slashdot: I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR COBOL-WRITING OVERLOARDS

4) What season is it?
Slashdot: WHEN I WAS 3, I WROTE MY FIRST LISP-COMPILER BY MAKING THE HOLES IN THE PUNCHCARDS WITH MY GUMS ONLY
Judge: Nevermind
Slashdot: LEARN TO TYPE PROPELY, YOU PSYCHO!

5) Where do you call home?
Slashdot: IANAL, BUT FIRST POST!

State of AI

[Unoti]

These look about like conversations from chat bots in the 1980's. In the 80's I would have told you that AI in the year 2006 would be far beyond this stuff. But now, I'm beginning to think that it'll never advance much beyond this.

Re:State of AI

[iabervon]

Very little serious work has gone into chatbots since the 80s. The reason is that it's easy to make a chatbot that does practically nothing more than the textual equivalent of nodding whenever someone stops talking. It's hard to get any further with this approach. Actually chatting requires the bot to know something about some topic and be able to evaluate the other party's statements about it. Until both of these are done, you don't get a meaningful improvement. Furthermore, the system needs to be able to introspect its understanding of the topic. (There have been very old chatbots which actually did pretty well, by having a limited understanding of language and of some restricted topic. But these are relatively unintersting to chat with, compared to bots that let the user talk about anything and nod). Most of the recent AI research has involved making systems which behave appropriately in complex situations, and introspection isn't helpful for this (in people, this sort of stuff is preconscious, too; you can't explain how you recognize faces or voices or exactly how you identify spoken words). The things people have been working on turn out to have more direct practical uses, but they don't give the system anything to talk about. And, of course, there's been relatively little work on understanding arbitrary language since it became clear that it isn't that effective a way of communicating with computers anyway, because the human output side is slow and ambiguous, compared to other user interfaces.

Most likely, introspection in AI systems will be driven at some point by the need to combine different types of input to make a complete analysis (once there is sufficient success at handling those sorts of input), and language use will be driven by the need to handle language written for people as input (e.g., reading news reports for background information). At that point, it'll become reasonable to write an effective chatbot which talks about stuff that people care about.

Long way to go...

[Spy der Mann]

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.

Re:Eh, chatterbots.

[aslate]

But they do know what they're talking about!

Elbot: "Who convinced you to come visit me?"
Me: "Slashdot"
Elbot: "That explains all these geeks who have been visiting me."

See!

Re:This is a famous AI test called the Turing Test

[masterzora]

From Wikipedia:Karma whore,

Karma is a scoring system on Slashdot meant to reward "good" posting and punish "bad" posting. The goal is that people who repeatedly post offensive, offtopic, or otherwise unwanted messages will be punished with a lower visibility of their messages, and those who post informative, insightful, or otherwise desirable messages are rewarded with a higher visibility. Karma whores are individuals, or messages themselves, that attempt to receive feedback in the form of karma points. Often these will be needless information (such as a link to a Wikipedia article relevant to the subject being discussed), or a message of a political nature that is in alignment with the groupthink so that it will be moderated upwards by people who agree with the stance expressed in the message.

WTF?

[Dan Parker]

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.

And the winning entry...

[zpeterz63]

Bot: Can I help you?

Guy: I don't know, can you? ;-)

Bot: Wanna view my cam?

Guy: You know I do! Hey, are you a real person?

Bot: Of course I am, sweety. Hey, wanna cyber? :-)

Guy: Hell Yeah!

...

*The rest of the converstion was not released in public logs*

Re:And the winning entry...

[sessamoid]

Bot: Oh yeah, aight. Aight, I put on my robe and wizard hat.