Artificial Intelligence
| A chatbot called Mitsuku has won the annual Loebner contest to see if computers can convincingly imitate human behavior. |
A chatbot called Mitsuku has won the annual Loebner contest to see if computers can convincingly imitate human behavior.
Steve Worswick from the UK who wrote Mitsuku won $4,000 for his chatbot creation.
The four finalists in the 2013 contest went through four of rounds which saw them chat via text with the competition judges. After the rounds of questioning the Mitsuku chatbot was declared to be the most convincing.
Worswick said he started programming chatbots as a way to engage visitors to a website that showcased his dance music.
"Eventually I found that visitors were wanting to talk to the teddy bear rather than listen to the music," he said.
His work on chatbots got a bigger boost in 2004 when he was commissioned by a games company to write one called Mitsuku. This also lived on a website and the many conversations it has had with visitors has helped Worswick refine its conversational abilities.
That helped during the final, he said, because some of the questions the chatbots get asked are designed to catch them out.
Answering those involves writing a program that does much more than just grab canned responses from a long list of possible answers, said Worswick. Tricky questions include: "How many plums can I fit in a shoe?" and "Which is bigger, a big lion or a small mountain?"
| Related articles |
Although he has entered the Loebner contest before, 2013 was the first year he made it to the final. Winning, he said, was a big surprise.
"I was thinking I'd use this year as a learning experience to prepare for a win next year. I thought I'd probably come second or third," he said. "Winning is a dream come true."
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, 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 for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's. Such a computer can be said "to think." Each year an annual cash prize 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.
SOURCE BBC News
| By 33rd Square | Subscribe to 33rd Square |
0 comments:
Post a Comment