Bot Contest

Well other than letting me know that I had entered, I never heard anything after that.

I must say I have no relation with the Loebner organizers this year whatsoever. I didn't attend the semifinals, and I have no more clue about them than you.

Patricia, I'm thinking you had a regular guest. There are certain special characters that should be appended to the lines if it came through the Professor's contest page. I don't know exactly how it would look, but it should stand out pretty easily from a normal guest conversation.

I spent a lot of time yesterday talking to Chris, Robby, going over options, writing email, and at the end of the day, my course of action looked clear, and here it is.
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Dear Loebner Committee,

I have decided to take back my withdrawal. I will continue to participate in the contest and make possible the participation of the other Personality Forge bots. My decision is based largely on the hard work of Robby Garner and the Personality Forge botmasters. Robby brought the contest to Atlanta and came up with the Turing Hub idea, which enabled the Forge bots and other web-based AI to participate. He has been extremely helpful and a good friend. I dont want to see his effort go to waste.

The Forge botmasters are sympathetic to my reasons to withdraw, but they were also very excited about this contest and I dont want to take that away from them.

There are still issues that I feel need to be addressed, and I expect we can work through them in an amicable fashion in the weeks to come. I have heard of your intention to refund Joy her travel expenses, and I thank you for that. It is a generous and noble thing to do.

Sincerely,
Benji Adams
The Personality Forge
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The thought here is that we shouldnt let Neil Bishop ruin it for so many other people. Hugh Loebner responded to my email, saying he regretted the problems and he was going to be forwarding the emails to someone at Cambridge. He said he'd write back in more detail later. I wrote to him again last night, and offered the idea of the agreement, to see if he thinks it would be constructive. I havent heard from him or the Loebner Committee since last night. The ball's in their court now. I still want to push the agreement, and have 8 semifinalists who've signed on.

It appears that Hugh doesnt want to be directly involved with the problems this year, but he doesnt want them to be ignored or hidden either. Here are the people to contact:
• Dwight Harshbarger: Executive Director of the Cambridge Center, and ultimately responsible for the functioning of the contest: harshbarger@behavior.org
• Ms. Stacie Sutton: Media contact at GSU: stacie@gsu.edu
• Professor Thomas Whalen: Responsible for bringing GSU into the contest: whalen@gsu.edu 404-651-4080

Also, the newsgroups "comp.ai" or "comp.ai.nat-lang"

Let's go ahead with the web page showing all the unanswered emails. Please send what you have to me at benji@daystream.com.

Professor, I think your idea about creating a web page documenting how shoddy the contest has been run is a good idea. It will be a good source of information for what not to do for future groups looking to sponsor the Loebner.

Chris

Any news yet?

I haven't heard anything and to be frank this is getting rather old. The semi-finals were to be on the 21st. It gets moved to the 28th. We all know what happen there. They say the final 8 will be selected on the 30th and here it is October the 1st. Of course they may have already e-mailed the final 8 and I wasn't one of them and if that's the case I guess I look like a blooming idiot.

Chris

Join the club. I don't see how, though, they never even talked to SS

Just got this!----------------------------------------

The purpose of this email is to announce the 8 finalists for
the 2002 Loebner Prize Competition. They are as follows:

Kevin Copple
Wendell Cowart

Eugene Demchenko & Vladimir Veselov
Joy Harwood
Abe Othman
Fred Roberts
Robert Wald
Richard Wallace

All entrants were good and the effort everyone made is
appreciated. It was difficult to choose 8 finalists out of
all the talented applicants. Details on the process by which
the finalists were chosen will be posted on the web site
tomorrow.

Thank you to everyone who applied!
Loebner 2002 Organizing Committee
---------------------------------------
Considering the fact that I wasn't ever evaluated, I'd be interested to see that process by which the finalists were chosen.

Same process that selected the semi-finalists, I'd wager.

I'm not sure. The only sign I ever saw of a judge-type conversation was weeks ago, when a few people briefly spoke to her using similar words to the ones on her application transcript, and asked her if she had a dog/cat. Other than that, the guests I've had haven't looked like actual judges at all.