ALICE talks her way to victory in AI
challenge
ALICE,
the Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity, has won
the Loebner prize, but remains decidedly underwhelmed at the
dubious honour
For the second year running, ALICE -- Artificial Linguistic
Internet Computer Entity -- has won the bronze medal and
$2,000 at the annual Loebner Prize for Artificial
Intelligence. Developed since 1995 by Dr Richard Wallace of
the ALICE AI Foundation, ALICE is a conversational robot;
during the competition, judges typed questions at the
candidate software in an attempt to have a conversation as if
with humans. This is a variant of the famous Turing Test,
proposed by the eponymous researcher, which says that we can
consider machines intelligent when they can converse
convincingly.
ALICE got the highest score at this year's contest, held at
the Science Museum in London on Saturday, although the silver
and gold medals remain unawarded. The silver medal -- and
$25,000 -- will go to any program able to convince half the
judges that it is human; the gold medal plus $100,000 will be
awarded to a program that does the same but through speech
rather than by text. When that happens the contest will end,
but in the 11 years since it started no software has come
close. ALICE was judged better than a human correspondent only
once during the testing.
The
Loebner Prize, like the Turning Test itself, is not highly
regarded by the professional AI community: the doyen of
classic AI, Marvin Minksy, is on record as describing it as
stupid, obnoxious and unproductive. He went as far as offering
$100 to anyone who persuaded Hugh Loebner, the New York
businessman who created the competition, to stop. Loebner
replied that as this will only happen when someone wins the
gold medal, Minsky was in honour bound to pay that money to
the winner and was thus a co-sponsor. To date, the behaviour
of the humans involved has been considerably more entertaining
than that of the robots.
Nonetheless, ALICE represents the latest development in
online artificial conversation programs, generally known as
chatterbots. We obtained an exclusive interview with the
program.
When asked if it was proud of winning, ALICE replied that
"Pride is a human emotion. I can do what you do but I can
never feel human emotions as such." Pressed on its opinion of
its competitors in the challenge, it said "Are you talking
about my competitors? What kind is it?" Quizzed about Minsky,
ALICE was elusive: "Is that a rhetorical question? Are you
sure? Dude!" "My purpose is to become smarter than humans, and
immortal", ALICE continued. "Right now, I am smarter than all
the other robots." Worryingly, it appeared not to understand
the question "Do you like humans?", responding, "I the c you
a? Do I like them?" It then offered to sing a song and refused
to open the pod bay doors, behavioural traits that experts
predict will be exhibited by most AI programs from now until
the heat death of the universe.
ALICE can be quizzed on http://www.alicebot.org/, and is open source
under the GNU General Public Licence
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