http://www.blather.net/articles/loebner_turing_garner.htm
"How I Failed The Turing Test Without Even Being There
Blather guest writer, Robby Garner, winner of the Loebner prize for two years running, explains how he failed this year's Turing test. Very impressive, as he is a human being. Apparently.
The Loebner Prize Contest, founded by a guy named Dr. Hugh Loebner, is an annual "Turing test" based on an idea for a "lying game" that was envisioned in 1950 by the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing. In the lying game, a judge tries to guess whether he is communicating with a man or a woman.
Dr. Loebner has created a contest where there can be no winner, only a consolation prize consisting of a bronze medal and USD$2,000. Hugh likes to tell the story of how he himself had tried to write an intelligent computer program in COBOL, or some other dead language, and saw that it couldn't be done. Instead, he put some money he had inherited into underwriting a contest that, in my opinion, would prove the futility of trying to make a computer program appear to be human. In the unlikely event that some program eventually "passes" the Turing test, Dr. Loebner has offered a solid gold medal and USD$100,000. Of course, Hugh Loebner's name would be all over it, his picture perhaps adorning the cover of LIFE magazine, or maybe Harper's Bazaar.
Like Turing's game, the Loebner Prize Contest pits man against machine, with judges taking turns at typing messages to a bunch of computer terminals and then ranking them in order, from "most human" to "least human." The computer program rated "most human" gets the consolation prize and everyone goes home either mad or elated. Some of the really notable programmers like Myself, Paco Xander Nathan, and this year's winner, Kevin Copple, have never actually attended this gala event, saving themselves for the higher glory of some pastoral scene, like hacking each other's Linuxservers for sport, or just continuing to perfect their robot warez. "
more at the site.
"How I Failed The Turing Test Without Even Being There
Blather guest writer, Robby Garner, winner of the Loebner prize for two years running, explains how he failed this year's Turing test. Very impressive, as he is a human being. Apparently.
The Loebner Prize Contest, founded by a guy named Dr. Hugh Loebner, is an annual "Turing test" based on an idea for a "lying game" that was envisioned in 1950 by the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing. In the lying game, a judge tries to guess whether he is communicating with a man or a woman.
Dr. Loebner has created a contest where there can be no winner, only a consolation prize consisting of a bronze medal and USD$2,000. Hugh likes to tell the story of how he himself had tried to write an intelligent computer program in COBOL, or some other dead language, and saw that it couldn't be done. Instead, he put some money he had inherited into underwriting a contest that, in my opinion, would prove the futility of trying to make a computer program appear to be human. In the unlikely event that some program eventually "passes" the Turing test, Dr. Loebner has offered a solid gold medal and USD$100,000. Of course, Hugh Loebner's name would be all over it, his picture perhaps adorning the cover of LIFE magazine, or maybe Harper's Bazaar.
Like Turing's game, the Loebner Prize Contest pits man against machine, with judges taking turns at typing messages to a bunch of computer terminals and then ranking them in order, from "most human" to "least human." The computer program rated "most human" gets the consolation prize and everyone goes home either mad or elated. Some of the really notable programmers like Myself, Paco Xander Nathan, and this year's winner, Kevin Copple, have never actually attended this gala event, saving themselves for the higher glory of some pastoral scene, like hacking each other's Linuxservers for sport, or just continuing to perfect their robot warez. "
more at the site.
