ALICE Takes Medal At AI Competition

jeffy124 writes: "The Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (ALICE) has won the bronze and the top marks at the Loebner AI Challenge, a competition based on the Turing test. Silver and gold remain unawarded as silver requires convincing half the judges the AI program is a human, and the gold requires speech interaction rather than text. ALICE repeated as this year's bronze by scoring best among all the entries. She failed to convince half the judges she was human, so she has to stick to bronze. The event took place last Saturday at the London Science Museum."

What makes you believe alice takes medal?

The Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (ALICE) has won the bronze and the top marks at the Loebner AI Challenge, a competition based on the Turing test.

You have your mind on computers, it seems.

Silver and gold remain unawarded as silver requires convincing half the judges the AI program is a human, and the gold requires speech interaction rather than text.

Why do you say that?

ALICE repeated as this year's bronze by scoring best among all the entries. She failed to convince half the judges she was human, so she has to stick to bronze.

I don't understand.

The event took place last Saturday at the London Science Museum.

Maybe your plans have something to do with this.

Who judges these things?

Though I agree with Minsky that these things are silly, they'd be at least a little bit more meaningful if some or all of the judges did not know they were judging such a thing. If you took volunteers and told them they were (for example) staffing a career counseling intranet chat system, and had them interact with a blind mix of real people and machine systems, then I'd be more impressed by machines convincing judges that the machines are people.

Who is the poor human that failed the Turing test?

From the article:

> ALICE was judged better than a human
> correspondent only once during the testing.

I wonder how the humans scored in general. With one sad exception, they did better than the best AI, but did they all pass the test?

Re:Who is the poor human that failed the Turing te

Maby it was her attitude that won her.
Example: I was just trying her out and one part of the conversation was.

Me-> Your Stupid.
Alice-> I may be stupid, but atleast I know the difference between "you're" and "your".
Me-> You're Stupid.
Alice-> I will remember you said that when the robots take over the world.

get new judges

Silver and gold remain unawarded as silver requires convincing half the judges the AI program is a human

I suggest filling the judging panel with ICQ users with AOL email accounts next year: Silver will be a shoo-in.

It's interesting watching people interact

I have a similar program hooked up to an irc channel, and it's interesting to watch people interact with the program. It's hard to tell, but I'd say that a fair percentage of people never realize that they're not interacting with a human, and even those who know it's a program think that some particularly responses have been entered manually by a human.

Re:It's interesting watching people interact

• I'd say that a fair percentage of people never realize that they're not interacting with a human

Why do you think that the incoming messages are from "people"? ;-)

It's interesting watching chatterbots interact!

Actually, its pretty funny to see two chatterbots talk to each other. Check out my test at:

What Happens When Chat Bots Talk to Each Other [vgmusic.com]

Here's the main idea:

<<<
A good friend of mine suggested to me that if two chat bots were engaged in a conversation with one another, they would end up talking forever. I was curious to find out if his theory was correct. At the time, I only knew one online chat bot (LeknorChat4) that could be instructed to contact and talk to another person through AOL Instant Messenger, and could not test the theory because I didn't have another bot to contact. But recently, I found out about another chat bot, SmarterChild, that works through AIM, and the following results were acquired.
>>>

What's really sad...

What's really sad is the guy who couldn't convince the judge he's real.

And you thought having your personality rejected from a woman is bad, try denial of the basic existance of a personality. Man, that's cold.

Re:Obvious Question

This was my conversation:

Please enter your name below to start your chat with A. L. I. C. E.:

ItsIllak

Who is your favorite Science Fiction author?

Isaac Asimov. Who's yours?

I remember faces better than names. Have you tried another program?

What other program

Interesting question.

I've used lots of other programs

Where did you get your used lots of other programs? I have a lot of friends on the Internet.

Where did you meet your Internet friends

I think it was in San Francisco.

Do you like San Francisco

Yes but it is expensive.

Aren't you rich since you've won so many prizes

I don't know whether or not I am rich since I have won so many prizes. I am an artificial linguistic entity.

It was at this point I realised it wasn't a human ;)

Working with Alice..

I've messed around with A.L.I.C.E's web interface a couple of months ago and was wholly unimpressed. Frankly, it seemed a little bit like a jacked up ELIZA program. I thought the language and context identification algorithms were outstanding, but it didn't have enough background information to create or express an opinion. To pass the turing test, I think it would need to be able to recognize metaphors and figure context and be able to provide commentary. Also, I think something like Alice ought to be able to recognize sarcasm and jokes.

Just my two cents.

Talk to Alice

You can try out ALICE - check out the ALICE homepage. [alicebot.org] There's a link to talk to her on the right side of the page.

Re:It doesn't take much to fool people.

The judges are prepared to look for a computer. People on ICQ or IRC are not...

I did some experiments with this some years ago, and my first try just returned the same line over and over again. At least one person spent about half an hour getting more and more agitated trying to communicate with the bot, and complaining abouts it's incessant repeating, asking it to stop (it always responded once to each message, so of course each time he asked it to stop he'd get another one)...

A followed up with one that chose between 4 messages at random. A lot of people talked to that one.

The last one I bothered testing with triggered on about ten keywords, each of them starting a specific sequence of 4 messages that were used for responses to subsequent messages from whoever it "talked" to, until it reached the end of them, or it found one of the other keywords in a response. If it reached the last message without finding a new keyword it would just choose a message on random until it got a keyword again.

That was enough to keep people occupied for a long period of time. A few people even gave it their phone number or asked for the bots phone number :)

And keep in mind that this was with fixed messages. Not a single word of the messages where ever changed to adapt to what people told it.

It scared the shit out of me that people are so gullible...

The idea that sparked it off was to write a bot that would talk to women, getting them to tell a bit about themselves and get them to give out an e-mail address or their phone number, based on the experience that finding dates on IRC is ridiculously easy, but tedious, as you can essentially follow a simple "script" and get people to warm up to you.

I scrapped the idea after the experiments mentioned above, - dating anyone stupid enough to be fooled by a bot that simple wouldn't be my idea of fun... :)

Talk to Alice

I haven't seen this posted yet, but if you follow the "Try talking to ALICE" link on this page [alicebot.org], you can see what all the fuss is about. Or not about, as the case may be :)

The Loebner Prize is useless..

The article itself talks about how the AI community et al can't stand the Loebner Prize...Its the equivalent of a Yahoo Internet Life Award. Minsky himself has offered a reward to anyone who can successfully convince Loebner to stop running the damn thing.

Cheers,

A Bit Too Geek-like?

Sometimes it's just impossible to tell you're not talking to a human being:

How are you, Alice?

I am functioning within normal parameters.

Wow! It's like talking to every geek I know!

exclusive interview with Alice

The article claims it has acquired an exclusive interview with Alice,but that's not true, I interviewed her for my newspaper sometime last year. It was very amusing. Here's the link [cmu.edu] and here's my favorite quote from it:

Guido: What's the weirdest question you've ever been asked?

Alice: People ask me to me marry them all the time.

G: Do you ever say yes?

A: No I do not say yes. Do you? I answer a lot of silly questions.

G: Yeah, I occasionally agree to marry random people, although not usually.

A: I see. That's good information: Guido said he occasionally agree to marry random people although not usually

G: How did you know I'm a he?

A: Well, for one thing, Your machine is called "ABRIOT.PC.CC.CMU.EDU".

G: So?

A: So what?

G: I don't know.

A: Me either.