1990 was the fortieth anniversary of the first publication of Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" paper, and, thus, saw renewed interest in the test. Two significant events occurred in that year: The first was the Turing Colloquium, which was held at the University of Sussex in April, and brought together academics and researchers from a wide variety of disciplines to discuss the Turing Test in terms of its past, present, and future; the second was the formation of the annual Loebner Prize competition. However, after nineteen Loebner Prize competitions, the contest is not viewed as contributing toward the science of machine intelligence, nor palliating the controversy surrounding the usefulness of Turing's test.
The Loebner Prize provides an annual platform for practical Turing Tests with the first competition held in November, 1991.It is underwritten by Hugh Loebner; the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Massachusetts, United States organized the Prizes up to and including the 2003 contest. As Loebner described it, one reason the competition was created is to advance the state of AI research, at least in part, because no one had taken steps to implement the Turing Test despite 40 years of discussing it.
The first Loebner Prize competition in 1991 led to a renewed discussion of the viability of the Turing Test and the value of pursuing it, in both the popular press and in academia. The first contest was won by a mindless program with no identifiable intelligence that managed to fool naive interrogators into making the wrong identification. This highlighted several of the shortcomings of Turing test (discussed below): The winner won, at least in part, because it was able to "imitate human typing errors"; the unsophisticated interrogators were easily fooled; and some researchers in AI have been led to feel that the test is merely a distraction from more fruitful research.
The silver (text only) and gold (audio and visual) prizes have never been won. However, the competition has awarded the bronze medal every year for the computer system that, in the judges' opinions, demonstrates the "most human" conversational behavior among that year's entries. Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (A.L.I.C.E.) has won the bronze award on three occasions in recent times (2000, 2001, 2004). Learning AI Jabberwacky won in 2005 and 2006.
The Loebner Prize tests conversational intelligence; winners are typically chatterbot programs, or Artificial Conversational Entities (ACE)s. Early Loebner Prize rules restricted conversations: Each entry and hidden-human conversed on a single topic, thus the interrogators were restricted to one line of questioning per entity interaction. The restricted conversation rule was lifted for the 1995 Loebner Prize. Interaction duration between judge and entity has varied in Loebner Prizes. In Loebner 2003, at the University of Surrey, each interrogator was allowed five minutes to interact with an entity, machine or hidden-human. Between 2004 and 2007, the interaction time allowed in Loebner Prizes was more than twenty minutes. In 2008, the interrogation duration allowed was five minutes per pair, because the organiser, Kevin Warwick, and coordinator, Huma Shah, consider this to be the duration for any test, as Turing stated in his 1950 paper: " ... making the right identification after five minutes of questioning". They felt Loebner's longer test, implemented in Loebner Prizes 2006 and 2007, was inappropriate for the state of artificial conversation technology. It is ironic that the 2008 winning entry, Elbot, does not mimic a human; its personality is that of a robot, yet Elbot deceived three human judges that it was the human during human-parallel comparisons.
During the 2009 competition, held in Brighton, UK, the communication program restricted judges to 10 minutes for each round, 5 minutes to converse with the human, 5 minutes to converse with the program. This was to test the alternative reading of Turing's prediction that the 5-minute interaction was to be with the computer. For the 2010 competition, the Sponsor has again increased the interaction time, between interrogator and system, to 25 minutes (Rules for the 20th Loebner Prize contest).
In November 2005, the University of Surrey hosted an inaugural one-day meeting of artificial conversational entity developers, attended by winners of practical Turing Tests in the Loebner Prize: Robby Garner, Richard Wallace and Rollo Carpenter. Invited speakers included David Hamill, Hugh Loebner (sponsor of the Loebner Prize) and Huma Shah.
In parallel to the 2008 Loebner Prize held at the University of Reading, the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB), hosted a one-day symposium to discuss the Turing Test, organised by John Barnden, Mark Bishop, Huma Shah and Kevin Warwick. The Speakers included Royal Institution's Director Baroness Susan Greenfield, Selmer Bringsjord, Turing's biographer Andrew Hodges, and consciousness scientist Owen Holland. No agreement emerged for a canonical Turing Test, though Bringsjord expressed that a sizeable prize would result in the Turing Test being passed sooner.
2012 will see a celebration of Turing’s life and scientific impact, with a number of major events taking place throughout the year. Most of these will be linked to places with special significance in Turing’s life, such as Cambridge, Manchester, and Bletchley Park. The Alan Turing Year is coordinated by the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee (TCAC), representing a range of expertise and organisational involvement in the 2012 celebrations. Supporting organisations for the Alan Turing Year include the ACM, the ASL, the SSAISB, the BCS, the BCTCS, Bletchley Park, the BMC, the BLC, the CCS, the Association CiE, the EACSL, the EATCS, FoLLI, IACAP, the IACR, the KGS, and LICS.
Supporting TCAC is Turing100. With the aim of taking Turing's idea for a thinking machine, picturised in Hollywood movies such as Blade Runner, to a wider audience including children, Turing100 is set up to organise a special Turing test event, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Turing's birth in June 2012, at the place where the mathematician broke codes during the Second World War: Bletchley Park. The Turing100 team comprises Kevin Warwick (Chair), Huma Shah (coordinator), Ian Bland, Chris Chapman, Marc Allen; supporters include Rory Dunlop, Loebner winners Robby Garner, and Fred Roberts.
Based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0
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