Hugh Loebner (March 26, 1942 - December 4, 2016) was an American inventor and social activist, who was notable for sponsoring the Loebner Prize, an embodiment of the Turing test. Loebner held six United States Patents, and was also an outspoken advocate for the decriminalization of prostitution.
Loebner established the Loebner Prize in 1990. He pledged to give $100,000 and a solid gold medal to the first programmer able to write a program whose communicative behavior can fool humans into thinking that the program is human. The competition has been repeated annually and has been hosted by various organizations. Within the field of artificial intelligence, the Loebner Prize is somewhat controversial; the most prominent critic, Marvin Minsky, has called it a publicity stunt that does not help the field along.
Loebner also liked to point out that, unlike the solid gold medal for the Loebner prize, the gold medals of the Olympic Games are not solid gold, but are made of silver covered with a thin layer of gold. [1]
Fascinated by Alan Turing's imitation game, and considering creating a system himself to pass it, Loebner realized that even if he were to succeed in developing a computer that could pass the Turing test, no avenue existed in which to prove it.
In his letter to Dr. Robert Epstein, written on December 30, 1988 , Loebner authorized Dr. Epstein to move forward with a contest, and referring to the Turing Test, Loebner wrote: "Robert, in years to come, there may be richer prizes, and more prestigious contests, but gads, this will always be the oldest."Establishing the Loebner Prize, he introduced the Turing Test to a wider public, and stimulated interest in this science. It remains Hugh Loebner’s desire to advance AI, and for the Turing Test to serve as a tool to measure the state of the art: "There is a nobility in this endeavour. If we humans can succeed in developing an artificial intellect it will be a measure of the scope of our intellect" (from: In Response, 1994) Archived 2008-03-14 at the Wayback Machine .
Loebner was open about his visits to prostitutes. [1] In 1994, after a campaign by officials in New York City to arrest customers of prostitutes, he wrote an opposing letter to The New York Times , which was published. [2] In 1996, he authored a Magna Carta for Sex Work or Manifesto of Sexual Freedom, [3] in which he denounced the criminalization of consensual sexual acts, and asked all like minded people to join a protest on June 9, 1996 (a play on the 69 sex position). In interviews, he stated that he believed himself to be too old for the young attractive women he is interested in; they would not have sex with him were it not for the money. He has compared the oppression of prostitutes and their customers to the oppression that Alan Turing faced because of his homosexual behavior.
Loebner held a Ph.D. in demography from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst. He was divorced, lived in New York City, and owned Crown Industries, a manufacturer of crowd control stanchion and brass fittings, which is the major sponsor of the Loebner Prize in the US.
On December 4, 2016, Hugh's ex-wife, Elaine Loebner, announced on Twitter that Hugh had "died peacefully in his sleep". He was 74 years old. [4]
Marvin Lee Minsky was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts concerning AI and philosophy.
A chatbot or chatterbot is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. Designed to convincingly simulate the way a human would behave as a conversational partner, chatbot systems typically require continuous tuning and testing, and many in production remain unable to adequately converse, while none of them can pass the standard Turing test. The term "ChatterBot" was originally coined by Michael Mauldin in 1994 to describe these conversational programs.
The Loebner Prize was an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awards prizes to the computer programs considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The prize is reported as defunct since 2020. The format of the competition was that of a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge simultaneously holds textual conversations with a computer program and a human being via computer. Based upon the responses, the judge must decide which is which.
Rollo Carpenter is the British-born creator of Jabberwacky and Cleverbot, learning Artificial Intelligence (AI) software. Carpenter worked as CTO of a business software startup in Silicon Valley.
Ned Joel Block is an American philosopher working in philosophy of mind who has made important contributions to the understanding of consciousness and the philosophy of cognitive science. He has been professor of philosophy and psychology at New York University since 1996.
Robby Garner is an American natural language programmer and software developer. He won the 1998 and 1999 Loebner Prize contests with the program called Albert One. He is listed in the 2001 Guinness Book of World Records as having written the "most human" computer program.
Albert One is an AI chatterbot bot created by Robby Garner and designed to mimic the way humans make conversations using a multi-faceted approach in natural language programming.
A.L.I.C.E., also referred to as Alicebot, or simply Alice, is a natural language processing chatterbot—a program that engages in a conversation with a human by applying some heuristical pattern matching rules to the human's input. It was inspired by Joseph Weizenbaum's classical ELIZA program. It is one of the strongest programs of its type and has won the Loebner Prize, awarded to accomplished humanoid, talking robots, three times. The program is unable to pass the Turing test, as even the casual user will often expose its mechanistic aspects in short conversations.
The Verbot (Verbal-Robot) was a popular chatterbot program and Artificial Intelligence Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows and the web.
Procuring or pandering is the facilitation or provision of a prostitute or other sex worker in the arrangement of a sex act with a customer. A procurer, colloquially called a pimp or a madam or a brothel keeper, is an agent for prostitutes who collects part of their earnings. The procurer may receive this money in return for advertising services, physical protection, or for providing and possibly monopolizing a location where the prostitute may solicit clients. Like prostitution, the legality of certain actions of a madam or a pimp vary from one region to the next.
Robert Epstein is an American psychologist, professor, author, and journalist. He was awarded a Ph.D. in psychology by Harvard University in 1981, was editor in chief of Psychology Today, and has held positions at several universities including Boston University, University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University. He is also the founder and director emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Concord, MA. In 2012, he founded the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), a nonprofit organization that conducts research to promote the well-being and functioning of people worldwide.
Artificial stupidity is commonly used as a humorous opposite of the term artificial intelligence (AI), often as a derogatory reference to the inability of AI technology to adequately perform its tasks. However, within the field of computer science, artificial stupidity is also used to refer to a technique of "dumbing down" computer programs in order to deliberately introduce errors in their responses.
The computer game bot Turing test is a variant of the Turing test, where a human judge viewing and interacting with a virtual world must distinguish between other humans and video game bots, both interacting with the same virtual world. This variant was first proposed in 2008 by Associate Professor Philip Hingston of Edith Cowan University, and implemented through a tournament called the 2K BotPrize.
The confederate effect is the phenomena of people falsely classifying human intelligence as machine intelligence during Turing tests. For example, in the Loebner Prize during which a tester conducts a text exchange with one human and one artificial-intelligence chatbot and is tasked to identify which is which, the confederate effect describes the tester inaccurately identifying the human as the machine.
Eugene Goostman is a chatbot that some regard as having passed the Turing test, a test of a computer's ability to communicate indistinguishably from a human. Developed in Saint Petersburg in 2001 by a group of three programmers, the Russian-born Vladimir Veselov, Ukrainian-born Eugene Demchenko, and Russian-born Sergey Ulasen, Goostman is portrayed as a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy—characteristics that are intended to induce forgiveness in those with whom it interacts for its grammatical errors and lack of general knowledge.
The World Charter for Prostitutes' Rights is a declaration of rights adopted in 1985 to protect sex workers' rights worldwide. It was adopted on 15 February 1985 at the first World Whores Congress in Amsterdam by the newly formed International Committee for Prostitutes' Rights (ICPR). The Charter established a human rights-based approach to prostitution, demanding that sex workers be guaranteed freedom of speech, travel, immigration, work, marriage, motherhood, health, and housing, amongst other things. This approach has subsequently been further elaborated by the sex workers' rights movement.
The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation was a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel, such as a computer keyboard and screen, so the result would not depend on the machine's ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator could not reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine would be said to have passed the test. The test results would not depend on the machine's ability to give correct answers to questions, only on how closely its answers resembled those a human would give.
The Alan Turing Year, 2012, marked the celebration of the life and scientific influence of Alan Turing during the centenary of his birth on 23 June 1912. Turing had an important influence on computing, computer science, artificial intelligence, developmental biology, and the mathematical theory of computability and made important contributions to code-breaking during the Second World War. The Alan Turing Centenary Advisory committee (TCAC) was originally set up by Professor Barry Cooper
There exists a diversity of feminist views on prostitution. Many of these positions can be loosely arranged into an overarching standpoint that is generally either critical or supportive of prostitution and sex work. The discourse surrounding prostitution is often discussed assuming sex workers are women, but those in the field of sex work and prostitution are not always women.
Sexuality in the Philippines encompasses sexual behavior, sexual practices, and sexual activities exhibited by men and women of the Philippines past and the present. It covers courtship strategies for attracting partners for physical and emotional intimacy, sexual contact, sexual reproduction, building a family, and other forms of individual interactions or interpersonal relationships, as set and dictated by their culture and tradition, religion, beliefs, values and moral convictions, psychology, foreign influences, and other related factors.