Home Page of
The
Loebner
Prize in Artificial Intelligence
"The First Turing Test"
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Loebner Prize Gold Medal
(Solid 18 carat, not
gold-plated
like the Olympic
"Gold"
medals)
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What is the Loebner
Prize?
The Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence
(
AI
) is the first formal instantiation of a
Turing Test
. The test is named after
Alan Turing
the brilliant British mathematician. Among his many accomplishments
was basic research in computing science. In 1950, in the article
Computing Machinery and Intelligence
which
appeared in the philosophy journal Mind, Alan Turing asked the question
"Can a Machine Think?" He answered in the affirmative, but a central
question was: "If a computer could think, how could we tell?" Turing's
suggestion was, that if the responses from the computer were
indistinguishable from that of a
human
,the
computer could be said to be thinking.
This field is generally known as natural language processing.
In 1990
Hugh Loebner
agreed with The Cambridge Center for
Behavioral Studies to underwrite a contest designed to implement the
Turing Test. Dr. Loebner pledged a Grand Prize of $100,000 and a Gold
Medal (pictured above) for the first computer whose responses were
indistinguishable from a human's. Such a computer can be said "to
think." Each year an annual prize of $2000 and a bronze medal is
awarded to the
most
human-like computer. The winner of
the annual contest is the best entry relative to other entries that
year, irrespective of how good it is in an absolute sense.
Further information on the development of the Loebner Prize and the
reasons for its existence is available in Loebner's article
In
Response
to the article
Lessons from a
Restricted Turing
Test
by Stuart
Shieber
.
The Loebner Prize is made possible by funding from
Crown Industries, Inc., of
East Orange NJ.
Crowd Control Stanchions used at Loebner Prize competition are
provided by Crown Industries'
crowd control stanchion division.
For a comprehensive overview of chatbotsin general, check
chatbots.org
The 2010 Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence was held 23 October 2010 at California State University, Los Angeles.
The Loebner Prize communications protocol will be used in the
contest.
The Loebner Prize is an instantiation of the Turing
Test. The 2010 competition was the 20th running of the
contest. A total of US$ 5000 was awarded to the 4 finalists
as follows:
First Prize: $3000 and the Bronze Annual
Medal Bruce Wilcox
Second Prize: $1000 Richard Wallace
Third Prize: $750 Rollo Carpenter
Fourth Prize: $250 Robert
Medeksza
At risk will be the $25,000 Silver Medal Prize.
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