As part of the 2012 celebrations for the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, Bletchley Park will be hosting the Annual Loebner Prize competition to find the world’s best conversational computer program. These programs, known as “chatbots”, will be competing for a bronze medal and a prize fund of $7,000 (currently about £4,700), sponsored by Dr Hugh Loebner who founded the competition 20 years ago.
The Loebner Prize competition is based on the Turing Test, one of the biggest challenges in the world of Artificial Intelligence. The test was proposed by Alan Turing in a 1950 paper entitled Computing Machinery and Intelligence, as a way of determining whether a computer program could be said to be intelligent. The judges at the competition will conduct conversations with the competing chatbots and with some human surrogates, and will then rank all their conversation partners from most humanlike to least humanlike. The chatbot with the highest overall ranking wins the prize.
Alan Turing led Britain’s code-breaking efforts during World War Two, when he and his team were based at Bletchley Park.
The Loebner Prize was inaugurated to provide an incentive for Artificial Intelligence researchers and a way of measuring progress in this field. Turing forecast that by the year 2000 it would be possible to program computers so well “that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance” of determining whether their conversation partner was a human or a computer. Turing’s estimate has turned out to be on the optimistic side, but the stimulus of the Loebner Prize has helped to encourage progress, and it is only a matter of time before a program succeeds in passing the Turing Test and winning its designer the ultimate Loebner award of a gold medal and a $100,000 cash prize.
The Turing Centenary Loebner Prize competition will take place on May 15th 2012 and will be organized by Dr David Levy, twice winner of the prize.