Unfortunately the robotics club cannot judge due to school regulations. Exploring a couple of other options and will post in the next few days. Anyone not entering who is interested, feel free to contact me.

Vince

Meeting with members of the computer science wing of one of the local colleges to see about judging on Thursday. Trying to get some high profile judges. I will post after the meeting.

Vince

Ok! One judge secured, hopefully the rest today. All contestants should be able to start sending their questions in by Friday.

Vince

Ok judging is set and the online form is pointing to the Judges email address, so send in your questions. http://contest.risoftdev.com/enter.asp  In the interest of full disclosure, Denis accidentally sent me his questions before I got the address changed over. I actually did not see them, but still have asked him to resend new questions. If they end up getting used, Denis can tell us which question was his original question and I will disqualify us from getting scored on that one question. Depending on how many people actually send in ten questions, we may have to use alternate means but lets see how it goes. I will have a list of bots participating up today or tomorrow.

Vince

Submitted my questions and entered Laybia.  Hope we can hold on to the crown!

Hope I’m not too late. I just entered Mitsuku and submitted 10 questions.

...and I just entered Izar.  I almost couldn’t figure out that “How many circles do you see” question during submission, however.  I hope that isn’t any indication on my bot’s performance!

I entered Skynet-AI, but also failed the circle test.

I just entered my Bot called Aidan, hope I am not to late.

Dan

I failed the circle test first time too. I was counting the broken ones but didn’t dare post!

After the contest is over, I would be interested in seeing all of the questions that everyone submitted.
Even if they are not used.

Yes, I would as well.

No problem guys. Even if we end up making this fairly regular thing as was planned, publishing the potential questions is a good idea and I will add it to the list of rules. I have a legal issue to resolve on Monday, by Tuesday I will have freed up time and will compile a list of those people who have not committed directly but are on the RoboChat Challenge List and see if I can get some direct commitments. I spoke with the individual who has agreed to do the judging, the emails are getting to him, he has downloaded the tool for the random selection. I’m thinking of making the official date the 17th if no one has any objections. That way our lone judge has some time to go over other contests to get a sense of the judging, for the record it is a past CEO of several tech companies.  If any of the people enrolled have email addresses for the people on the robochat list, please feel free to contact them and have them officially sign up.  And…if we don’t get many direct signups, those of us who are in and have submitted questions, will have to agree on a way to fairly select enough questions so that we have 15 or 20 or so in a set.  (In other words if only five of us have submitted questions, and we take a single question from each set, we get a 5 question field. We could take 3 questions per contestant, but then if we include some of the bots that have not directly responded, its a little biased against them.) Maybe we could get Roger Davies, Dave Morton and some other people in the field to submit some questions? Anyway, post your ideas here.

Vince

One other thing, the idea with this was to create a contest environment which could be run fairly regularly that was in the hands of the Chatbot community, rather than any one organization. So if you have suggestions on the scoring, or any other aspect, please jump in. And even though RISOFTDEV is hosting this one, anyone who wants to take it from here and host it again lets do it! WHo knows, at some point maybe we might see it run by a committee and regular once a month contests or something along those lines. The field itself is moving forward rather quickly these days!

Vince

With regard to the scoring.  If an entity is a dragon from space and you ask what do you like to eat , it could say moonrocks. This maybe acceptable but I would like to have the judging and the entities based in reality only so that silly answers like this score poorly.  There have been entries to the loebner that are cat, dragons etc. This makes it all silly and makes the whole thing a joke.  All entities should be adult male or female humans. Do we agree?