Hi,
I stumbled across this challenge yesterday. http://www.chatterboxchallenge.com/index.php  I’m curious if any of you have any experience working with that challenge.  It seems like good practice for the “Loebner Prize”....or is it the other way around?

Thanks,
Chuck Bolin

Chatterbox challenge is an alternative for the Loebner Prize. The big advantage is also its drawback: the competion runs on a distance. The good thing is that the whole world can compete, chatbots are connected to live sources such as wikipedia, and that audiences can test the bots themselves.

The drawback however is that it’s hard to prove that you’re not talking to a real human.

I’ll invite some of my contacts @Chatterbox Challenge to this thread, they might be able of help.
(update: done)

In this mean time, you can check out:
http://www.chatbots.org/awards
This is an attempt to list details of all conversational turing tests, competitions and awards.

The Chatterbox Challenge is not a Turing test. It is a contest of chatterbots based on other criteria.

Hi all,

Thanks Erwin for informing me. I’m Ehab El-agizy who is currently managing the Chatterbox Challenge (CBC) contest. CBC is indeed an alternative for Loebner Prize, however CBC offers wider variety of bots that can participate in the contest. We’re trying harder every year to come up with new ideas to benchmark chatbot intelligence and to make it simple for participants to enter the contest at the same time.

CBC 2010 is expected to accept participants very soon and should start in 15th March 2010. I’m also trying to design new techniques for judging chatbots and to be very similar to Turing Tests as well as convincing guests that they are chatting to a chatbot not to a real human. This could be the hardest task to prove this, but based on my experience I don’t think that we were facing sort of this issues as CBC 2009 results was very reasonable, not biased and fair enough. In addition to that, chatlogs is now available for the public, a new judgment system will be implemented and it’s free to enter your chatbot.

Please check CBC 2009 results at the link below:
http://www.chatterboxchallenge.com/result.php

Please let me know if your have other questions, thoughts or suggestions.

Best regards and have a nice day,
Ehab El-agizy

Hi,
@Erwin,
I’m inclined to build a desktop chat application.  I gather from your comments that the chatterbox challenge requires a web-based interface.  I imagine web-based bot get greater exposure to people and to all the ways that the English language may be abused. =)  I’m not necessarily convinced that the online feature is absolutely necessary. However, I’m open to other input on the matter…particularly about how one uses the ‘chats’ for training the bot.

@Robby,
I’ll take a look-see at the criteria for the chatterbox.  I’m not capable of articulating the differences right now but I definitely need to learn that.  I had thought that one challenge might be used in preparing for the other challenge…and vice versa.

@Ehab,
Hi and thanks for posting.  I’ll look at the link you provided. I’m very interested in the ‘chat logs’. I’ve been collecting and reading transcripts from previous Loebner prizes in order to develop a clearer understanding of the complex problem.

Regards,
Chuck Bolin

@Chad: create a webinterface for a chatbot is probably not rocket-science, but I can imagine you don’t want to hire servers to serve 10.000 + users. You might want to consider to have a web interface in a protected area, so with a limited number of users. Chatbots.org might facilitate this process if you like to use our member-account system. Contact me if you like the idea and when the time is there.

@Chuck, We accept both desktop and web-based chatbots + there is a desktop chat bot called “Artemis” won the 2nd place in CBC 2009.

there is a desktop chat bot called “Artemis” won the 2nd place in CBC 2009.

That’s very encouraging! Thanks for pointing that out.

So, I now know of a couple of potential competitions to motivate myself to build my first chat bot.  I suppose it’s all down hill from here. =) j/k

Thanks again for your response,
Chuck Bolin

voila

http://www.chatbots.org/chatterbot/artemis/