This is little to do with sodarace, but I guess many of you might be interested in a yearly contest called the Loebner Prize. Basically the entrants are invited to create a computer program that can take part in conversation over a network like IRC chat.
The judges chat to both the programs and some real people on the network without knowing who is who. The judges have to decide whether they are chatting to a human or computer, and if the judges are fooled into thinking that a computer is a human, then it wins.
This is a version of the Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing, a British mathematician who is also known for breaking the enigma code during the second world war.
Anyway, here are the links:
http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html
Last years competition:
http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/2001_Contest/loebner-prize-2001.html
You can download and play with some of the entrants. By the way, nobody has won yet but a prize for the most 'human-like' program is awarded each year.
|