Robby Garner
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Robby Garner (b. 1963) is a natural language programmer and software developer. He won the 1998 and 1999 Loebner Prize Contests with the program called Albert One, and is currently living in Cedartown, Georgia
Garner considers himself to be a computational behaviorist after the term coined by Dr. Thomas Whalen in 1995. Garner's first attempts at simulating conversation involved collections of internet chat viewed as a sequence of stimuli and responses. The stimulus response model was an inspiration for Dr. Richard S. Wallace's ALICE project.
Kevin Copple of EllaZ Systems has collaborated with Garner on several projects, including Copple's Ella, for which, Garner contributed voice recordings and music. Garner and Copple believe that intelligence may be built one facet at a time, rather than depending on some general purpose theory to emerge. Albert One and Ella are examples of multifaceted conversational systems
One of the first web chatterbots, named Barry DeFacto, was written by Garner and Paco Xander Nathan in 1995. Barry served two purposes, to collect data about web chat behavior, and to entertain customers of the FringeWare online bookstore. This program was eventually implemented as a Java package called JFRED. JFRED went beyond the simple simulus-response database and featured an activation network written in a scripting language called JRL. JFRED has been featured in BBC Television's "Tomorrow's World MegaLab Experiment" and attained a 17% Turing percentage during what was the largest online Turing test at the time.
Garner competed in six Loebner Prize contests, using the competition as a way to test his prototypes on the judges each year. Having won the contest through incremental improvement to his system, Garner attributes his success to the same principle that says intelligence may be acquired one facet at a time.
Garner's most recent work involves multiple chat bots working under the control of a JFRED bot acting as a master control program. Using this technique, the strengths of various web agents may be united under the control of a Java applet or servlet. The control program categorizes stimuli and delegates responses to other programs in a hierarchy. A spin-off of this technique is the Turing Hub, an automated Turing test featuring four of the top Loebner Prize Contest competitors.
