The final results:

1. Mitsuku (Steve Worswick - Pandorabots)
2. Tutor (Ron C. Lee - Pandorabots)
3. Rose (Bruce Wilcox - ChatScript)
4. Izar (Brian Rigsby - Pandorabots)

Hugh Loebner presented Steve with the bronze medal and the check for $4000!!

I’m really pleased that another AIML bot besides ALICE won the Loebner Prize.  I believe this shows the strength of the underlying technology, Pandorabots and AIML, for creating award-winning chatbots.  Lightning doesn’t just strike once on the ALICE bot!

The day’s events also featured a Junior Loebner contest, with teenagers serving as judges and as human confederates.  The results of the Junior contest were:

1. Tie for first place - Mitusku and Tutor
2. Tie for second place - Izar and Rose

I would especially like to thank Professor Paul McKevitt of Ulster University, Magee Campus, for his superhuman efforts organizing this year’s event. 

Loebner also announced that next year’s contest will be held in Bletchley Park UK again, on November 15, 2014.

Congratulations to all the finalists, especially Steve/Mitsuku!

I do have to admit that I’m kinda disappointed that even after all this time the Loebner Prize is still being won by fairly basic pattern-matchers, though.

Congrats, Steve, and well done! Another notch in the belt!

Also well done to the other competitors. Just placing well in the Loebner is something to be proud of.

@Jarrod:

I don’t think that there’s anything “basic” about any of the top contenders, really. And it goes to show that “simplicity is often the key to success”.

Dave Morton - Sep 14, 2013:

@Jarrod:

I don’t think that there’s anything “basic” about any of the top contenders, really. And it goes to show that “simplicity is often the key to success”.

What I meant is that all the chatbots that do well at the Loebner Prize are front ends to databases in which sentence-sets constitute ontologically basic elements. Such an approach may successfully outcompete the current rivals, but it could never be extended to actually consistently pass properly-conducted Turing tests (an AI-hard problem). To be clear, though, I didn’t mean to undermine the achievements of the finalists, which are of course very impressive.

Congratulations Steve and the others.

Congratulations to all involved and well done Steve.

Good job Steve.

Another well-deserved victory Steve!  Congrats!

Some photos on Flickr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/50366015@N05/9741860832/in/photolist-fQRzPN-fQRzM9-fQRzH3-fQEfN4-fQEfxk-fQGgua-fQGhm6-fQGhug-fQEfqi-fQRzHN-fQEfo4-fQRzFS-fQRzGY-fQEfFF-fQEfGR-fQsm6J-fQsm4W-7UANxZ-ay3kbv-fQRzjY-fQGgZe-fQGgtr-fQRzGm-fQEfj6-fQRzuW-fQRzvN-fQEfrV-fQGgti-fQRzjj-fQEfsz-fQEfCk-fQGh62-fQGfkn-fQRzzY-fQEfr8-fQEfma-fQRzs1-fQGfux-fQEfjP-fQGgqP-fQEfGX-fQEfxc-fQEfsM-fQRzhA-9xeWzC-9wGBpJ-9nyz8M-9wWpUz-7VRC9j-brDYuo-e9sHoe

Congratulations to Steve for winning Bronze! And to the others for at the very least gaining what must have been an interesting experience.

I should have taken a bet because the outcome is pretty much as I had expected. To be honest the contest would have interested me more if there had been a greater diversity in AI systems among the competitors. But on similar grounds I am pleased that Mitsuku won, because I know that she taps into a bit more advanced methods than pattern-response every here and there, and I am curious to learn to what extent methods like inference provided an advantage during the rounds.

Looking forward to further reading, and I hope the media reports will be more fair to Mitsuku than they were to Chip Vivant for not being actually human.

Congratulations to Steve and all the contestants.

VLG

Well done, Steve.  I expected nothing less.

While Steve humbly refers to Mitsuku as his “hobby,” the truth is his bot is the result of a lot of work over time.  You might not know that he makes some of his work freely available at http://www.square-bear.co.uk/aiml/ where you can download his very creative AIML files.

He’s also available at the AI Nexus Forum (http://knytetrypper.proboards.com/thread/2218/pandorabots-video-origins-alice-aiml) where he can answer AIML questions, offer suggestions, and sometimes trouble-shoot for you.  The success and joy I’ve experienced with chatbots is largely due to the help I’ve had from Steve.

Jarrod Torriero - Sep 14, 2013:

I do have to admit that I’m kinda disappointed that even after all this time the Loebner Prize is still being won by fairly basic pattern-matchers, though.

You might wish to view the following video from Dr. Wallace, if you haven’t already seen it, regarding Origins of ALICE and AIML: From Turing to the Web.
http://knytetrypper.proboards.com/post/6630

The comment that stood out for me had to do with Zipf’s Law.

“Certain words and phrases occur much more frequently than others.”  “People behave much more like robots than we think we do.  People tend to say the same things over and over again, which they have said before, or heard other people say before.  So, although the number of combinations of language used in everyday conversation is quite large, it’s not astronomically large.”  Dr. Wallace then credits the observation to the work of George Kingsley Zipf.

With that understanding, I believe that pattern matching is the strength of AIML, and largely responsible for its ease of use.  Do visitors really care how a chatbot arrived at an answer if it’s correct, or if it properly emulates natural/conversational language?

Nice work Steve!!

Merlin - Sep 14, 2013:

Good job Steve.

I’m agree

Jarrod Torriero - Sep 14, 2013:

I do have to admit that I’m kinda disappointed that even after all this time the Loebner Prize is still being won by fairly basic pattern-matchers, though.

I’m agree too

I will make a readable transcript as soon as I will have the raw files of conversations.

Wow that’s terrific news! It’s a great, intense, and an extraordinarily fantastic story!

Congratulations to all the contestants!

Congratulations Chatbots.org for having one of its own win!
Congratulations Great Britain for being #1 in the world with Mitsuku!