Loebner Prize I - rules and restriction

The Loebner Prize is an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awards prizes to the chatterbot considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The format of the competition is that of a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge simultaneously holds textual conversations with a computer program and a human being via computer. Based upon the responses, the judge must decide which is which.

The contest began in 1990 by Hugh Loebner in conjunction with the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, Massachusetts, United States. It has since been associated with Flinders University, Dartmouth College, the Science Museum in London, and most recently the University of Reading. In 2004 and 2005, it was held in Loebner's apartment in New York City.

Within the field of artificial intelligence, the Loebner Prize is somewhat controversial; the most prominent critic, Marvin Minsky, has called it a publicity stunt that does not help the field along.

In addition, the time limit of 5 minutes and the use of untrained and unsophisticated judges has resulted in some wins that may be due to trickery rather than to plausible intelligence, as one can judge from transcripts of winning conversations

The rules of the competition have varied over the years and early competitions featured restricted conversation Turing tests but since 1995 the discussion has been unrestricted.

For the three entries in 2007, Robert Medeksza, Noah Duncan and Rollo Carpenter, some basic "screening questions" were used by the sponsor to evaluate the state of the technology. These included simple questions about the time, what round of the contest it is, etc.; general knowledge ("What is a hammer for?"); comparisons ("Which is faster, a train or a plane?"); and questions demonstrating memory for preceding parts of the same conversation. "All nouns, adjectives and verbs will come from a dictionary suitable for children or adolescents under the age of 12." Entries did not need to respond "intelligently" to the questions to be accepted.

For the first time in 2008 the sponsor allowed introduction of a preliminary phase to the contest opening up the competition to previously disallowed web-based entries judged by a variety of invited interrogators. The available rules do not state how interrogators are selected or instructed. Interrogators (who judge the systems) have limited time: 5 minutes per entity in the 2003 competition, 20+ per pair in 2004–2007 competitions, and 5 minutes to conduct simultaneous conversations with a human and the program since 2008.

Based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_prize licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0