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Is Your IM Buddy Really a Computer?
audiovideodisco writes "Every year the Loebner Prize goes to the chatbot (and the corresponding human companion) that fares best on a Turing test administered by a panel of judges. Discover talked to Kevin Warwick, the professor who runs the competition, to get pointers on how one would go about detecting a bot. While there are some general approaches you can use, nothing is foolproof — and asking about Sarah Palin can be downright deceptive. One judge concluded an interlocutor was a bot because it didn't recognize Palin's name ... but it turned out the chatter was a French librarian who'd simply never heard of her." The chat transcripts show how difficult picking bot from non-bot is getting.
Ben Goertzel, AGI researcher, wrote in his article that crowd of people constantly talking to a virtual parrot would help it to grow into a naturally speaking context-understanding AI.
... aka Captain Cyborg, is a running joke in the UK for many, many years.
His name associated with this event makes me smirks in anticipation of The Register coverage..
I've been a bot for years.
Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go round.
why Apple sucks or why Apple is great, why Linux sucks or why Linux is great, why Microsoft sucks
You're missing a 'great' in there. You are also missing the 'BSD' next to it.
I use the libpurple-based Mac OS X client Adium, and there is a plug-in available called Challenge/Response. This plug-in will intercept any messages from users not already on my buddy list and ask any question I like; if the user gets it right, I am asked to block/allow the user as if the plug-in wasn't even there. I used to be flooded with spam whenever I used my old MSN/Windows Live! account, but now I never get one bit of spam.
Windows and Linux/*NIX users should check out Adium's sister project Pidgin, and you can use the Bot Sentry or pidgin-privacy-please plug-ins to the same effect.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?