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Loebner Prize winner doesn’t believe in Turing Test anyway

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Yesterday saw Reading University here in the UK playing host to the annual Loebner Artificial Intelligence Prize event – a contest based around Alan Turing’s famous benchmark for artificial intelligence that can really think, namely whether or not it can successfully imitate human communications.

The bronze medal (for fooling a quarter of the judges) went to Elbot, a chat-bot program created by Fred Roberts, but Roberts himself seems to be not so impressed by Turing’s theory:

“I don’t think it’s anything like thought,” he said of Elbot’s conversational prowess. “If you know a magic trick, you know how it’s done, it’s not magic anymore. Sorry to be so pessimistic.”

With the caveat that I have no expertise in cognition or expert systems, I’m inclined to agree with him. [via The Guardian]

One thought on “Loebner Prize winner doesn’t believe in Turing Test anyway”

  1. Check out this Web 2.0 approach to chatbots: http://chatbotgame.com.

    Just as Deep Thought brute-forced it in chess with speed, the idea behind the Chatbot Game is to brute-force it with a huge number of user-submitted Google-like chat rules.

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