The important dates for the AISB Loebner Prize 2018 are as follows:

Entry Submission Deadline: Friday 29 June 2018

Announcement of Finalists: Monday 30 July 2018

Finals Day: Saturday 8 September 2018 at Bletchley Park

Information on the Loebner Prize Protocol (LPP2) is available here: https://github.com/jhudsy/LoebnerPrizeProtocol

Cheers, good luck, and I hope to see many of you at Bletchley Park!

Question: Seeing as Hugh Loebner no longer sponsors the contest, will there still be prizes?

Yes, there will still be prizes.

The reality is that the money for prizes might come from sponsorship, and the sponsor may make the reasonable demand that the competition bears their name.

I wonder if there will still be: this prize?

thanks for the information, Andrew. I appreciate it. I’ve not been able to respond this past week because my regular account seems to be broken. I made this current one to use in the interim. At least I can get back on now.

Hello everyone. Newbie question: Does selection round require use of the LPP? Hope this is the right place to ask.

Hi Tawanda. Yes, the selection round requires your program to communicate through the current LPP (See Stephen Mann’s post for the Github location). The selection round is basically a trial run to judge the quality of the programs as well as to ascertain that the programs will work in the finals.
http://aisb.org.uk/events/loebner-prize#Process16

By the way Dave, wouldn’t it be a good idea to split off the LPP-related posts into a dedicated topic for all LPP issues and questions?

Don Patrick - Mar 25, 2018:

By the way Dave, wouldn’t it be a good idea to split off the LPP-related posts into a dedicated topic for all LPP issues and questions?

Yes, it probably would, but thread continuity is also important. I’ll run through the thread and see if they can be split without too much disruption.

@Andrew Martin

Could you please give out some pretty much solid description of the computers the bots will be running on?

For me, the statement below doesn’t mean much.
Entries must work with the selection machines (Windows 7 Core i7 PC with min 4GB RAM)

1. Is it still Windows 7?
2. Is it a 32-bit or 64-bit OS?
3. What is the maximum RAM one should expect?
4. What about available storage space?

Another Question: Since its clear that chatbots that contain malware generally will be excluded from the competition, what is the BIG DEAL about the postal process, since international posting take weeks.

In the case of the bot exceeding the 1080MB dropbox limit:

5. What about making part of one’s bot available for download, during installation?

I mean this said part being automatically downloaded during installation from the Internet (cloud/web server).