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The Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence "The First Turing Test"

The Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence “The First Turing Test”

Published on: Jun 21, 2023

Updated on: Jun 21, 2023

What is the Loebner Prize?

The Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence ( AI ) is the first formal instantiation of a Turing Test. The test is named after Alan Turing the brilliant British mathematician. Among his many accomplishments was basic research in computing science. In 1950, in the article Computing Machinery and Intelligence which appeared in the philosophy journal Mind, Alan Turing asked the question “Can a Machine Think?” He answered in the affirmative, but a central question was: “If a computer could think, how could we tell?” Turing’s suggestion was, that if the responses from the computer were indistinguishable from that of a human,the computer could be said to be thinking. This field is generally known as natural language processing.

In 1990 Hugh Loebner agreed with The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies to underwrite a contest designed to implement the Turing Test. Dr. Loebner pledged a Grand Prize of $100,000 and a Gold Medal (pictured above) for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human’s. Such a computer can be said “to think.” Each year an annual cash prize and a bronze medal is awarded to the most human-like computer. The winner of the annual contest is the best entry relative to other entries that year, irrespective of how good it is in an absolute sense.

Further information on the development of the Loebner Prize and the reasons for its existence is available in Loebner’s article In Response to the article Lessons from a Restricted Turing Test by Stuart Shieber.

The Loebner Prize was originally made possible by funding from Crown Industries, Inc., of East Orange NJ.

For a comprehensive overview of chatbots in general, check chatbots.org

Your program will interact with the Judge Program using the Loebner Prize Protocol “LPP” via the sub folder with your program’s name which is nested within the Communications folder. The other three folders are used during the competition, but are not necessary for testing.

The Loebner Prize contest, first inaugurated in 1991 at The Computer Museum (Boston, USA), has been hosted internationally at locations such as: Carnegie Hall (NY, USA), The Science Museum (London), The Powerhouse Museum (Sydney, Australia), Bletchley Park (England), Dartmouth College (NH, USA), California State University (LA, USA), University College London, Surrey, Reading & Exeter Universities (England), Flinders University (Adelaide, Australia) and even Hugh Loebner’s appartment in New York City (USA).