Slashdot Mirror
Inside the 2012 Loebner Prize
An anonymous reader writes "Not a single judge was fooled by the chatbots in the 2012 Loebner Prize, which was won by the bot Chip Vivant. According to a journalist who was a human decoy in this year's Turing Test, interactions with the humans was a tad robotic while the bots went off on crazy tangents talking about being a cat and offering condolences for the death of a pet dragon."
I'm happy for all the bots that got to compete this year, but I was a little unhappy on the preliminary round of this years competition compared to other years I entered. Only 4 entries can make it to the final round of the competition. There were 12 entries this year but 7 were disqualified due to contest management (Hugh Loebner) not having enough technical knowledge to get the entries working. Some well known bots based on ALICE AIML were disqualified, Cleverbot was disqualified, and my own Ultra Hal was disqualified ( http://www.zabaware.com/webhal ) Internet communication is prohibited so we all have to send the bots as self installing programs that can utilize the contests LPP protocol. My own bot is Linux based, which is a big hurdle for the preliminary round, but I sent it as a virtual box image to simplify it for contest management, but he didn't know how to deal with it.
But luckily there will be another competition this year as part of Alan Turing's 100 year centennial at Bletchley Park on June 23rd and recognized by the Olympics http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR445524.aspx Some of the disqualified bots including my own will be competing there.