Humans aren’t the only ones who can steer a conversation to their own benefit. This year’s winner of the Loebner prize for the most convincing chatbot used such a trick to fool a human judge, earning its creator a $3,000 prize.
The Loebner prize is awarded for a version of the Turing Test, a method, first proposed by the British mathematician Alan Turing, of determining whether or not a computer program acts as if it is “thinking”. The essence of the test is that a human interacts with both a computer program and another human, and is then asked to say which is which.
via Prizewinning chatbot steers the conversation – tech – 26 October 2010 – New Scientist.