I know guys. Just grumbling out loud.

That’s clever Dave . At the same time, the computer can read the sentence as the judge is typing it out, so I would suggest the speed of thought in your fomula.
Luckily, for the time being I am only aiming to get through the selection round without mishaps, and what has been said about typos may also be said about timing.

“Who’s figures”? Is that accepted over “whose” nowadays? I’ll have to completely edit my grammar rules now /o/
One of the biggest obstacles for me in this contest may be the British English

It should really be “whose” but after the judge from the last Loebner came out with things like “howw r youuuuuu”, I guess anything goes.

I have in fact, now that we mention it, already a ‘natural response timer’ in my program, that waits longer depending on how many knowledge searches it took to answer the question. However, this was neither challenge nor anything of importance in opinion, I just did it to animate a nifty ‘brain activity’ bar. In real life, nobody wants to wait for an answer.

And I hope they don’t invite that same judge again, or I’ll do a bit more than just grumble.

I really can’t see him attending after he pretty much insulted everyone including Hugh himself.

Thank goodness. His bad attitude aside though I have to say, I looked up some of his writings, and his views on AI seemed at least reasonable. Anyway, I much hope to see conversations such as there were in 2012 at Bletchley Park, they were probing but civilised. It’s unfortunate that year’s transcripts seem to be offline.

Could you perhaps set flags in your timer? I’m assuming that you have a method that detects when the judge is finished typing, the you begin evaluating what was entered in order to respond, so maybe check the flag during your evaluation and if it is reset then abort the current operation and re-start the wait cycle?

V

@Don & Steve: Yes, the correct word (‘whose’) should have been used. The “Dreaded Grammar Nazi®” once again turns out to be merely Human after all…

@Andrew: Perhaps using things like intentional typos and timed delays may be “dumbing down” the contest, but by the same token, it’s good not to “give yourself away” by answering too “perfectly”, or too quickly. That said, the axiom “All things in moderation” should apply, I think.

@Don: Good point about the bot “reading” the input as it’s typed (though I suspect that this is not the case with most chatbots), so a slight adjustment to the timings of the algorithm should be considered.

Vincent: Hmm… Yes and no. Undoing an evaluation process would be much more trouble than it’s worth considering the complexity of my system. It’s just not necessary as long as the answer is given within a reasonable time.
I use a constantly running timer that is linked to keypresses to detect when the user has stopped typing. Any typing before the timer has run down completely will re-set it to wait a little longer before answering.

I see now that I misunderstood Andrew’s comment: He doesn’t mean that we should make our programs slower to seem more human, but to make them realise the appropriate (faster) time to respond. I agree that this is a useful function for e.g. voice interfaces. For keyboard interaction however it is commonly accepted that a quick tap on Enter is most efficient even in human conversation. Sometimes we even go so far as to pick up a mouse and click a “submit” button

Actually, forget all that. The typing of a question mark is a pretty clear signal.

Although I can see how time windows and bad spelling or punctuation might require some trivial language processing skills (or rather ordinary timers and spell checkers), in essence it’s just sabotaging the message along with the possibility of judging the computer’s ability to answer to the question’s contents, rather than to the question’s form. If you want an interesting AI contest instead of one with boring blank responses, you’d best type properly like Turing would.