By the way, what was the age of the school children? Elementary school or highschool? From their misspellings it would seem to be the former.

They were mostly aged 9 or 10 but there was a class of students aged around 14.

Now I’m settled back home, I’ve taken a closer look at Don’s scoreboard and it shows another issue with the voting system. The 3rd place most humanlike bot was Anna. This shouldn’t have even been included in this part of the voting, as it was a Facebook Messenger bot and internet access is not allowed. It was pretty clear that it wasn’t a person on the other end of Facebook typing back but the contest rules need to be strictly followed in order to eliminate even the remote possiblity of cheating.

Likewise, Talk2Me, Skynet-AI, Eva, Jason and Hanah also used the internet and should only have been included in the Best Overall Bot award.

It would be unreasonable to expect the public to know which ones were using the internet but these votes shouldn’t have been included in the final tally.

Some changes definitely need to be made for next year.

I would be surprised if the kids (or most of the adults) took the time to chat with each bot.
On average, a 2 minute conversation means about 4-8 volleys. Not much time to get to know/judge a bot.

Is anyone interested an on-line contest? I created some tech in the past that might help make it easier.

Only the jury chatted to every one of the entries, usually for about 5 minutes each. Many of the public spent about 20 minutes or so testing various bots and the school children picked one bot and stuck with that, as it was too busy for them to move around. This meant the children voted for the bot that they had tried. This was plainly obvious and the children’s votes were disregarded.

Sadly, this is the only contest for chatbots that I am aware of and I would be happy to take part in anything online if it existed. A word of caution for anyone who tries such a contest, I ran one in 2012 called Chatbot Battles based on a league scoring system at: http://www.chatbotbattles.com/ but I found that it took a LOT of time to organise and once a bot was knocked out of the contest, I got lots of diva type emails from disgruntled botmasters. I guess that’s why there’s no contests any more but it would be great to try and resurrect something.

Merlin - Sep 17, 2019:

Is anyone interested an on-line contest? I created some tech in the past that might help make it easier.

First off, Kudos to anyone willing to put on any kind of Chatbot contest. It is a ton of work and to have a poor turnout and, even worse, low click/eyeball-count sucks.

The easier it is to get entries, the better, like an on-line contest providing links to each bot.

Also, if you get rid of the “best able to decieve user into thinking they are talking to another person” bit, you might get some much more creative bots to enter.

But this is prolly best discussed in a different thread.