Dear Chatbots and Loebner Prize community,
What follows is an unofficial, informal, non-binding, announcement about the current plans for this year’s AISB chatbot event. I hope to confirm all the details and update the AISB website this month. This post therefore allows you to be prepared for the official announcement, but also allows you to comment and have some effect on any decisions made, where possible.
From now on the Loebner Prize will take on a new form, as fixture of an annual exhibition exploring the issues that interested Turing, Loebner, and the Chatbot Community. Importantly, we will completely relax the requirement for any submitted chatbot to perform in competitive rounds as per the Loebner Prize. The main impact is that we are now able to accept chatbots which are specialised to a single task as well as the free-form conversation bots previously accepted.
The rest of the exhibition will include submissions, and some commissions if possible, from collaborations between artists, roboticists and AI scientists, and will reference any of the issues raised when making a machine that performs as a human.
The exhibition this year will likely be over Thursday-Sunday in September. We have secured some funding, and have a dedicated exhibition space in the University of Swansea.
There will still be prizes, they will still be awarded by a panel of judges, but this will be on a more personal, situational basis. Personally, and I think I speak for most people involved, I’d rather distribute funds to more people in the form of travel awards to have more chatbotters at one event, than to have larger chunks of money going to fewer people. In this way the event will be more of a collaborative celebratory event, and less of a stressful competitive event.
There is nothing stopping exhibitors from agreeing on some kind of interaction between their chatbots, and even defining some kind of competition of their own, so anyone who wants their bot to face a classic Loebner Prize style challenge may still do so, we will even offer some assistance setting up and finding confederates, but can’t guarantee it will run smoothly (not that it always did) and won’t offer any prize money or medals to any winners.
Unfortunately, the Loebner Prize in its traditional state was unsustainable, the location of Bletchley Park, though historically ideal, was a poor venue for public exposure, making it impossible to secure sponsorship, which became an essential requirement. Also, I have heard a number of complaints from the community about the restrictions and specifications of the Loebner Prize and the LPP, so this is a way to respond to those issues. Finally, I feel there was growing enthusiasm from the organisers and participants to have a bit more of a dynamic event, rather than a recurring meeting of the same few entrants and technologies. I hope everyone welcomes the increased eligibility and, with any luck, the increase in number of people participating in the event.
Please let me know what you think, while we are still drafting the official announcement. I’m a bit frantic this weekend so I may have missed points out, but I’ll try to be responsive on this thread.
Cheers,
Andrew