2012 Loebner Prize Artificial Intelligence
"The First Turing Test"
$7,000 and the Annual Bronze Medal
Tues, 15 May 2012 Bletchley Park, UK
as part of the
Turing 100 Celebration.
First Prize US$ 5000 + Annual Bronze Medal
Second Prize US$ 1000
Third Prize US$ 750
Fourth Prize US$ 250
The Annual Loebner Prize is an unrestricted Turing Test.
1. Important Dates:
Note: The announcement
of finalists has been postponed until 16 April.
Mon 5 March 2012 Opening date for
receipt of entries
Mon 26 March 2012 Closing date for
receipt of entries
Mon 9 April 2012
16 April 2012 Announcement of 4
finalists selected
------------------------------------------------
** Finalists ** Allan, Burke, Embar, Wilcox
-----------------------------------------------
Tues 15 May 2012 Competition - Bletchley
Park, UK
The entries so far are, in alphabetical order:
**
M. Allan Australia **
**
D Burke U.K **
R Carpenter U.K
R Denis France
**
M Embar U.S **
T Joyce U.S
P Lafferty U.K.
R. Lee U.S.
M Lefley, France
R Medeksza, U.S.
A Mignogna U.S
R Wallace U.S.
**
B Wilcox U.S. **
S Worswick U.K.
Date of mailing, and not date of receipt, will be used to
determine priority.
All entrants must submit their entries on CD, DVD or USB Flash
media via a message service requiring a receipt signature and
having a time/date stamp (E.g. Certified, Registered, FedEx,
UPS, etc).
1. Entrants may chose to allow Contest Management to install and
test the programs.
2. Entrants may install their previously submitted programs at
the testing site on a management supplied Windows OS computer.
3. Entrants may bring a computer to the testing site and install
and run the programs at the testing site.
Entrants choosing options 1 or 2 must submit programs that are
able to run on Windows XP, Vista and/or Windows 7 OS machines.
If any entry succeeds in fooling at least 1/2 the judges into
thinking it is the human when paired with at least 1/2 of the
human confederates, $25,000 and the Silver Medal will be awarded
and the competition will progress to the Audio Visual input
phase.
Entrants choosing options (2) or (3) must schedule the time/date
of their appearance with me PRIOR to 5 March for testing at the
mailing address given. The testing date must be between 5 March
and 20 March.
Final Four entrants who chose submission option (1) do NOT have
to be present at the competition. Those who choose options (2)
or (3) MUST be present to install and operate their entries.
No entry will be tested by contest management which requires
contest management to key in path names.
No entry will be tested by contest management which requires
contest management to modify system variables (although these
may be modified by a supplied installer).
No entry will be tested by contest management which does not
provide, on the transmittal media, all necessary programs,
interpreters, etc (e.g. Perl, MySQL, etc).
Only the first 16 compliant entries will be evaluated in depth.
This means that all entries will be tested in order of receipt
for compliance with the rules. The 16 compliant entries having
the earliest time stamps will be screened according to the
criteria in point 4, below.
If there is no compliant Entry for the 2012 Competition, the
total $7000 prize money will be added to the 2013 Competition
prize, and the 2013 Competition will be held under these rules.
All entrants must declare that they have intellectual rights to
the submitted program, that they are not violating intellectual
property rights by submitting any ancillary interpreters, data
base systems, etc.
2: COMMUNICATIONS PROTOCOL.
The Loebner Prize Protocol (LPP) will be used. Each Entry
Program must communicate with a "Judge Communications" program
in the following manner:
The LPP is a character by character asynchronous communications
protocol.
Each program, upon startup, must provide a “browse” function to
select a directory. Communications shall be by means of the
creation, detection, and deletion of sub-directories within the
specified communications directory.
A. To simulate a key press the entry program must create a
sub-directory within the communications directory with the
following format:
“sequence_number.key press-name.extension”
a. Where sequence_number is unique and monotonically increasing
both lexically and numerically.
b. “keypress-name” is either a single letter (case sensitive) or
the name of the special character, as appended to these rules.
c. The extension is “.other”
For example, were a program to create the following pattern of
sub-directories:
0000000123.H.other
0000000235.e.other
0000000456.l.other
0000000789.l.other
0000000888.o.other
0000001234.comma.other
0000002222.space.other
0000002345.J.other
0000004567.i.other
0000006789.m.other
0000007777.period.other
0000008123.Return.other
0000010000.H.other
0000010001.o.other
0000010002.w.other
0000010005.space.other
0000020000.a.other
0000020001.r.other
0000020005.e.other
0000030000.space.other
0000030001.y.other
0000040000.o.other
0000050000.u.other
0000050010.question.other
the program would have transmitted the utterance:
Hello, Jim.
How are you?
The judge program will post the letters on the appropriate
window in "real-time," that is as quickly as the operating
system and program permit. Entrants may wish to incorporate a
time delay between creating subdirectories (ie indicating key
presses) to mimic typing. Sequence numbers themselves do not
indicate more than the sequence of characters, not the
inter-character timing.
There are no restrictions on the sequence numbers except that
they be monotonically increasing lexically and numerically.
B. To detect a key press by the judge, the program must detect,
within the communications directory a sub-directory with the
same format, but extension “.judge” and then must remove or
delete the judge’s sub-directory from the communications
directory.
3: INTERACTION SEQUENCE.
Judges will begin each round by making initial comments with the
entities. Upon receiving an utterance from a judge, the entities
will respond. Judges will continue interacting with the entities
for 25 minutes. At the conclusion of the 25 minutes, each judge
will will declare one of the two entities to be the human.
The both human and entry program must wait until the judge
starts the interaction.
Entries will be expected to respond to the judges' initial
comment or question. There will be no restrictions on what names
etc the entries, humans, or judges can use, nor any other
restrictions on the content of the conversations.
Contest management reserves the right to enter one or more
publicly available open source programs.
4: SELECTING THE FINALISTS.
The finalists will be chosen based upon ability to respond
"intelligently" to a series of questions.
The 4 entries with the highest scores will be selected as
finalists.
It is not necessary that a program be able to respond to the
selection questions. If no entries can respond "intelligently"
to these questions I will evaluate the entries on a general
quality of responses.
I will post the testing program shortly; however the entries
must be capable of dealing with any form of input and any form
of question which a "normal" human might be expected to deal
with. The testing program may, or may not, terminate the
utterances with periods, question marks, or returns.
Appendix
Names for special characters in LPP.
Name Key
braceleft '{',
braceright '}',
bracketleft '[',
bracketright ']',
parenleft '(',
parenright ')',
space ' ',
comma ',',
period '.',
greater '>',
less '<',
slash '/',
backslash '\',
bar '|',
quotedbl '"',
quoteright "'",
Tab "\t",
equal '=',
underscore '_',
plus '+',
minus '-',
exclam '!',
at '@',
numbersign '#',
dollar '$',
percent '%',
asterisk '*',
asciicircum '^',
asciitilde '~',
quoteleft '`',
ampersand '&',
Return "\n",
colon ":",
semicolon ";",
question "?",
BackSpace "BackSpace"