The AISB have posted details about this year’s Loebner Prize event.
http://www.aisb.org.uk/events/loebner-prize

By coincidence, I’m at the same expo in London as one the organisers and have clarified a couple of things.
1 - Anyone who wants to enter the main prize still has to provide a human like bot. This must be standalone (no internet access allowed.
2 - You don’t have to use the prohibitive Loebner Prize protocol, as your bot will not be competing against another human.

REFERENCE: http://www.aisb.org.uk/events/loebner-prize

“Please send enquiries and intentions to shown your chatbot or conversational interface to:”

CORRECTION: “shown” should be “show”.

thank you. I can’t wait to enter.

It is an interesting compromise, certainly less stringent. I guess I’ll go make my program public-proof.

One thing it doesn’t seem to mention is how to enter and what are the deadlines etc. Does anybody know those details? or will they provide an update?

There’s an email address on the post for you to write to if you are interested in the event. It’s from the 12th - 15th September

aisb.org.uk/events/loebner-prize - Sep 15, 2019:

The Loebner Prize is the oldest Turing Test contest, started in 1991 by Hugh Loebner.

91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 00, 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18.  So “the oldest Turing Test contest” ran for 28 years.

Steve Worswick - Apr 25, 2019:

The AISB have posted details about this year’s Loebner Prize event.
http://www.aisb.org.uk/events/loebner-prize

By coincidence, I’m at the same expo in London as one the organisers and have clarified a couple of things.
1 - Anyone who wants to enter the main prize still has to provide a human like bot. This must be standalone (no internet access allowed.
2 - You don’t have to use the prohibitive Loebner Prize protocol, as your bot will not be competing against another human.

Steve, It looks like it will be fun. I was at the AI show at Olympia, pity I missed you.

An entry form is now available: http://www.aisb.org.uk/events/loebner-prize

To be eligible for the Loebner Prize this year, please answer the questions below in an email [...] before Friday 19 July 2019.

Closing date is this Friday. Make sure to get your expression of interest email sent by then.
http://aisb.org.uk/events/loebner-prize

Who’s going to the Loebner this year?

Me!

I plan on being there for all 4 days. They’ve asked me to do a presentation to a group of schoolchildren about how to make a chatbot on Thursday. On Friday, businesses are attending, so it would be good to make a few contacts.

Great hope to see you there, not sure what days i can do yet but hope to be there at least Saturday and Sunday

As security and operation of the programs are considered our own responsibility, I have made a small launcher that runs invisibly in the background and ensures that a chatbot program is always re-launched after 3 seconds in the event that a user closes it.

You can download the launcher (and c++ source code) here: keeprunning.zip.
You can run the launcher by passing an exe as parameter, e.g. “keeprunning notepad.exe”.

To stop re-launching, press HOME + ESCAPE (a messagebox also states this on first activation). The launcher only works for exe programs without additional parameters. In case anything goes wrong, you can manually close the launcher through Windows Task Manager (ctrl-shift-escape, under the tab “processes”).

I recalculated my travelling expenses and seeing as I don’t just have $1000 lying around, I won’t be attending in person. Steve, I would really appreciate it if you could pick up Arckon’s logs at the end of the event, as I don’t trust the organisers to remember to do so. I’ll set something up.

Anyone else still active for this event? I haven’t spotted much activity.

Sure Don. I’ll copy then to a USB and then email them to you if you tell me what folder they are in. We can arrange this nearer the date.

I assume the event is still on but I get an authorisation error when visiting: http://aisb.org.uk/events/loebner-prize
and nobody from the event has contacted me regarding travel or hotel details. It’s in 11 days, so I help all is still ok.