Bot Contest

For anybody who's interested....Mercury is in retrograde.

Just got this from them (well, this is an excerpt):
"Due to the difficulty that some entrants
are having with the Turing Hub we are
forced to delay the semi-final event until
Sept 28th 2002. During the interim, evaluation
of all applicants will continue. The 8 finalist
will be announced of September 30th.

However, we will be profiling the certain
entrants
and will began our WebCast and media operation
on September 27th. Check www.Loebner-Atlanta.org
calender and news update for more detail. The
finals
will still be held at GSU on the 12th of October"

All APPLICANTS?! That will kick ass if Little Mu finally gets in after all! I hope they give decent notice if that is the case.

Funny you should mention that, Butterfly... I have a very recent song I wrote called Mercury in Retrograde. Take a listen on my project page at http://www.allhands.com/redwire if ya wanna.

I do wanna. And I'll locate a friend with an MP3 player.

I'm wondering now how many semifinalists there will be....and how many of y'all I will get to meet?

So, where is it happening in the end?

Still Atlanta. Beyond that, they didn't say. Finals will be held at Georgia State University, at any rate.

Well, it seems this web hub is more difficult than the Loebner expected. As Talk-Bot is written in javascript he won't work at all using that interface. I'm not sure what they will do regarding that. I really think the Loebner needs to open the lines of communications here.
I've gotten like one response from a number of e-mails I sent and it didn't even answer my question.

Chris

You probably got the same email as I did, but in case you didn't.....they provided a physical address to send 'stand-alone entries' to. (That might not be the sort of thing they meant, but you may want to risk it anyway.) If they didn't actually send you that, let me know and I'll shoot a copy in your general direction.

Really, Chris? You couldnt set it up so that it posts to a javascript page that reads it and outputs.. hmm.. Yes, that should work, using writeln(''); shouldnt it? How is the interface set up currently?

What does Mercury in Retrograde mean for us?

It affects issues related to communication.....and travel. (I should have known! ) It even affects mail and other deliveries, which might explain the ridiculous difficulties in you receiving your cookies and me receiving my new motherboard combo.

Mercury retrograde is not a good time to begin new projects unless you absolutely have to. It IS a good time to redo, rework, remodel, re-just about anything. If you begin something right now, there will be re-whatever to do later anyway.

Also explains the crap we've had with the mail around here lately. Someone discovered some white powder that was probably totally innocuous in a letter, and became convinced it was anthrax, so the post office shut down for a few days. Just some dork wanting his 15 minutes of fame. I mean who the hell would anthrax a shithole town in the middle of nowhere?

How long is this crap gonna last anyway? It could very well fuck up the readings we need to do, but we can't just not do them so we're gonna hafta deal with it.

It goes direct (normal) again on October 6, I think. Just a few days before Loebner finals.