Talk:Loebner prize

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[edit] made this an ai stub

This article could really use fleshing out with descriptions of the state of the art and progress over the years. Since judges do occassionally get fooled here, there is a case that the Turing Test has been passed by some systems, which is significant to the debate about Strong AI --Jaibe 20:39, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] fleshed out the requirements for the $25,000 prize

Although it has been traditional to state the requirements for the $25,000 prize (and by extension the $100,000 prize) as being merely to convince judges that a computer is a human, the structure of the competition makes this a misleadingly incomplete requirement. The judge knows that one entity is a computer and the other a human. Therefore in order to declare the computer to be the human the judge must also declare the human to be the computer. Stating this implicit requirement explicitly gives a clearer picture of what contestants in the competition are really up against, and raises the important question as to whether the competition can be won even in principle. This second requirement obviously being the harder of the two, leaving that requirement implicit misleads by omission. It also suggests that the Loebner Prize is not for passing the Turing Test but rather the very much harder Loebner Test. Vaughan Pratt 19:14, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Turing actually originally phrases his test as a thought experiment where you are trying to determine which of two people (over a terminal) is a man and which is a woman. the same problem of misattribution holds --- you have to both believe the deceiver and disbelieve the honest person. I've seen a group of AI graduate students run this test as a part of a competition, and indeed this sort of failure was rare. One time two people were pretending to be male they were asked their tux measurements, and as it happened the woman knew hers and the man had never even owned a suit. The other time two people were pretending to be women, and they were asked if they were ready to have a baby, and the woman said "yeah sure, why not, I'm ready." No one believed any women present thought that, so she lost. So my point is, it's not impossible, but it is way less probable. You'd have to ask a question the human happened to have a very unlikely answer for, while the computer would most likely have the average answer down.--Jaibe 20:32, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

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I removed "First Turing Test" because (see Jaibe's comments above) others have run what claim to be Turing tests, so this gets into complicated arguments over definitions. At the least, it would need attribution. Also, clarified that the contest decides among chatterbots entered in the competition, not all those in the world--for the latter, the organizers would have to actively recruit as many bots as possible, not just call for entries. Vicki Rosenzweig 01:03, 26 December 2006 (UTC)