Bot Contest

I haven't spoken to Project Zandra at length but I think he deserves the medal he won in the 15 questions. But that is only 1 part of the contest just as the public voting. The public voting is obviously flawed but it serves it's purpose. We need to generate traffic to the site for the benefit of the sponsor and once they get there we need to give them something to do. As the Professor pointed out it will never be perfect but the public voitng isn't going to decide the winner the judges will.

Chris Cowart

Fair enough.
I'm not saying the Chatterbox Challenge is BAD in any way, just that the unpredictability of the internet is unfortunately against us, IE missing judges, stuffed ballot-boxes, etc. There's really nothing you can do besides take it in stride I guess

The reason why you won't post who voted for who is because it will show what you are doing. You, better than anyone else, know how to manipulate the system. If it was public, everyone would know. That's the only reason you won't do it. You are already showing the votes and the running average.. If someone is tanking your bot on purpose, I think you should at least know who it is. Else, it will just keep happening over and over and the contest is rigged... just like I said. It's a rigged contest and you keep winning. At least Robby Garner pulled his own bot from a contest he was administering.

Oh.. and just because it takes a lot of effort doesn't mean that it shouldn't be a honest contest. Just because it doesn't cost the participants doesn't mean they should stand for fraud in the contest. Publish the votes and the voters!

One more thing.. pick any bot in the contest and I'll zip them right up to the top and make talkbot go to about 39th.

What if each one of us is guilty of scoring our bots highly? Would we want that published? What's the point of a secret ballot if everyone sees it?

Hey Chris, sorry for my premature congratulation. I went to the CC site looking for a timeline, and I saw the gold medal under news and just figured that was the grand prize. My bad.

Nobodyhere is right, the 2002 LPC was bogus. I regret having been associated with it. It has been a great source of embarrassment so far. But thanks for your recent comment giving me credit for at least one good thing.

I'd like to make some comments about what I've read here today.

For one thing, I think Benji deserves a lot of credit for building PF and opening it up for other folks to enjoy. There should be a contest for best chat engine, and the only other contender would be alice/pandorabots IMHO.

Back to Chris, I think you're in a precarious situation where your legitimacy seems to be in question despite the fact that I think talkbot is a very entertaining bot, and there are lots of reasons people enjoy talking to it.

Organizing a contest for bots is pretty complex as Neil Bishop found out last year. He managed to piss off nearly everybody who was even remotely involved as far as I can tell, largely due to bad communication skills, but also due to his personality traits that overshadowed the whole LPC last year.

But like a lot of things in life, Neil started out with the best of intentions. It is exceedingly difficult to make distinctions between thirty-something bots, much less 80 of them. There isn't that much variance when you compare the sum total of them with the performance of a real human being.

I got a lot of mileage last year with my "least human" confederate score. But my participation was not planned. Things went terribly wrong in the paradise, and I found myself stranded in Cedartown, wishing I could just go to sleep and wake up from the nightmare, typing to a bunch of judges that knew who they were conversing with, and the heat was on full tilt that day. Lots of things went wrong that could have gone right if the event had been better organized, better planned. Murphy's Law was in force as they say.

But being human involves trying to learn from past mistakes, and I think the 2003 LPC will be a competely different story. It may be harder to enter if you are a non-programmer, but so far it has a lot of good things going for it.

Robby.

nobodyhere is no longer even trying to make sense. I could analyze his arguments and point out fallacies, but it would accomplish nothing. I suggest that we all just ignore him.

And congratulate Chris, who gets a drink if he ever stops by Doug'd's.

I wonder if nobodyhere even has talked to talkbot. It's a wonderful bot. I wouldn't feel bad about losing to it.

I just chatted with and voted on some more bots. The first time I tried chatting with TalkBot, I thought it was the "dont talk to me" bot that the link goes to and was boggled (Chris, maybe you ought to link to it directly). But today I talked to the real thing and was pretty impressed.

Project Zandra was not extremely impressive, in my opinion.

Anyways, I posted just a few votes and the standings changed. That is to say, your votes will make a difference. God Louise is in 2nd place for best overall.

What he said... go and vote, everyone!