Loebner Prize Selects Alumnus Richard Wallace's ALICEbot for Most Human Responses

Dr. Richard Wallace, 1989 (Kanade), has won this year's Loebner Prize for his chat robot named ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity). The Loebner prize is a contest designed to implement the Turing Test, named after Alan Turing who proposed the idea that if a computer's responses were indistinguishable from a human's, then the computer could be said to be thinking. Each year the most human computer is chosen from all entries; the winning entry receives a $2000.00 prize and a bronze medal.

Winning the Loebner prize was personally significant for Dr. Wallace this year for two reasons. First, the year 2000 contest celebrated the 50th anniversary of Turing's 1950 paper proposing the 'Imitation Game'. Second, the contest was held at Dartmouth College where Dr. Wallace first used a computer in 1972 after his high school was 'wired' by teletype to a mainframe computer. In 1995 Dr. Wallace began working on ALICE. Originally a SETL program, first used to control a robot eye with natural language commands, ALICE migrated to the platform-independent Java language in 1998. Made open source under the GNU general public license, more than 120 developers from around the world now contribute to the ALICE project. Presently, Dr, Wallace is the President, CTO and co-founder of Alice Chat Robots, Inc. He has written four US patents and authored over 60 technical publications. Additionally, he has taught both university level courses and corporate training seminars in Java programming, robotics, network programming, and computer systems design.

For more information about ALICE, see . Information about this year's Loebner Prize can be found at

http://www.alicebot.org/

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~phil/events/LoebnerPrize2000.html.