Bruce Wilcox

Head Squeeze had a live G+ Hangout on Thursday 12th September especially for the Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence 2013. In this hangout Head Squeezer, Dan Schreiber, spoke with inventor and event sponsor Dr Hugh Loebner, and the botmasters of this year's contestants - Bruce Wilcox and Steve Worswick. Dr Richard Wallace of Pandorabots also joined in.

Dr Hugh thinks the quality of the responses have greatly increased. As the prize grew from year to year, he started asking more challenging questions in the early rounds.

There's been no negative response from the public about AI, they don't even know about it! But the Loebner Prize is not about popularity.

Question from SLSGuru 200 : Why am I tired after a long sleep? The reason is due to my mental model of you as a client.
Not a great answer, but not Steve can fix the bug in Mitsuku!

The biggest thing we can have as botmasters is people chatting to them so we can refine the responses and fine tune them! Practise makes perfect!

It's a bit different for Bruce Wilcox whose chatbots are to carry a conversation not just to answer questions.

All the bots in the Loebner prize are all scripted bots, they will not have access to the internet, but they can, just not in this competition.

The AI team are all friends, well friendly rivals! They're all part of a supportive online community and information and how to progress artificial intelligence.

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