Comment
I was at the Loebner Prize 2012 a fortnight ago – this year held at Turing's spiritual home of Bletchley Park – and all the talk was about this book. It seems that its success has lent a dash of sparkly celebrity to the rather tired format, and people were genuinely excited. My experiences and impressions of the chatbots can be found here: http://wp.me/p2cNtO-E. One thing I found particularly interesting was that the winner eschewed the usual tactic of building a fake character for his robot, conversing instead on its own terms – an approach that the judges found had more warmth and, ironically, humanity.
posted by DannyG Danno
June 1, 2012