The 2017 Loebner Prize has come to a close and so I thought I’d write about my experience on the day.
I arrived at Bletchley Park just before 10am, reported to the visitor’s reception and was met by the event manager who showed me to the building which had been set aside for this year’s contest. It was the first time an event manager had been allocated and the personal touch made the experience a pleasant one.
The contest was held in the same area as last year. The human confederates and chatbots were together in one room, the judge computers and public area were up a small flight of stairs nearby. I had a quick look round both areas, said hello to Bertie from the AISB and had a quick chat with Dr Wallace who was already there.
The public area consisted of the 4 judge computers, a large projection screen which displayed slides about the Loebner Prize and also 4 laptops set aside for visitors to use and interact with chatbots. There was also a cool NAO robot walking around interacting with people. On one laptop, Will Rayner had arrived and was setting up a copy of Uberbot. I had set up a link to the Turing Test part of Mitsuku’s website on a second laptop. On a third, I installed the old Loebner Prize judge program and a standalone copy of Mitsuku. The 4th one was left unused.
I then went into the private area and met Andrew Martin, this year’s organiser and Nir Oran, the tech guy. Andrew showed me the laptop allocated to Mitsuku and I installed her successfully in a few minutes. Andrew was following the instructions in a text file to configure Rose to work and had already installed Midge with no problem. Will arrived in the room and began setting up Uberbot. The bots were connecting to a test server and the plan was to see if they worked before moving it to a live server. There was no more I could do for now, so I explored Bletchley Park until we were ready to test.
The organisers were soon ready to test. All bots/confederates showed green on the console, which indicated all was working ok and a few test messages were sent from the judge computers which seemed to arrive and be processed ok.
Once happy, we amended our config files to point to the live server, sent a few test messages again and waited for the contest to start.
After lunch had finished, the judges sat at their computers, the human confederates at theirs and the contest started pretty much on time at 1:30pm
I am unaware of who the judges were or their background, as there was no mention of them in the handout.
The large projector screen displayed the webcast for the public to watch. The screen of each judge was displayed in rotation for a few minutes at a time on it.
Here is a round by round account of how things went. You’ve probably seen the webcast here: http://aisb-loebner-prize.org/static/webcast.html but I’ll include which judge was talking to which bot.