Inside the 2012 Loebner Prize

An anonymous reader writes "Not a single judge was fooled by the chatbots in the 2012 Loebner Prize, which was won by the bot Chip Vivant. According to a journalist who was a human decoy in this year's Turing Test, interactions with the humans was a tad robotic while the bots went off on crazy tangents talking about being a cat and offering condolences for the death of a pet dragon."

The Achilles' Heel of AI

[NicknamesAreStupid]

A friend of mine, who long ago worked for Thinking Machines, explained the weakness, "It is all about maintaining state." A stateless AI is far easier than a stateful one. Once the machine has to retain state, the algorithms become logarithmically more complex. Therefore, the way to test a bot is to say something like, "Remember this phrase, 'pink elephant'. I'm going to ask you after we have talked a while.." Then have several exchanges and ask, "What was that animal I told you to remember?" Most humans (except Alzheimer patients) will have no trouble with it, but the machine will fail. It they add a piece of logic to catch obvious clues like this, then a slight mod such as "have you ever seen a pink elephant? . . . what animal was I talking about?" will usually defeat it.

Humans are actually very poor at remembering. Try to recall the color of the last Volkswagen you passed on the street. However, we have developed a natural ability to prioritize our memories based on context and our personal & social needs. We tend to remember most of what turns out to be relevant. Until AI develops a means to judge context, it will suffer the weakness of being out of touch with our reality.