In the past chatterbots were suppose to just be able to trick a user into thinking that they were talking to a real person. But now that they are better known it has become a race between who can trick the user and who can get the chatterbot to mess up.
however I have noticed that in doing the contest that various methods have been used to create chatterbots. I will try a contest not done before.The purpose of this contest will be two fold, 1. to determine the best method of AI creation and or areas that each method needs to improve upon and who makes the best conversationalist.
This way the chatterbot community can get into the serious business of creating a more life like chat bot that companies could use on their website.
In this contest botmasters will take the core personality and data based and attempt to tranfer it into at least 3 different bot programs, perhaps ultrahal or the pf or wendells talk bot or alice etc..
The prize money would be from a percentage of the sponsorship money, all contestants would have to display a banner code of all the sponsors on their site in order to enter and the winner would have to display the sponsor who donated the most money on their site for one year. The winner however will also be able to advertise their bot and method for hire on the sponsors sites as well.There would be a small entry fee of 5.00 usa money or comparable currency of the contestant for money to be divided up between the judges. a small fraction of the money from sponsors would be used to pay for the monthly site fees.
a list of the money made and where it went will be posted on the contest site after the contest starts.Because of the intense nature of this contest and the work involved for bot masters the contest would not start until may 1, 2006.
none of the sponsors, judges or the site owner of the contest can enter a bot. so none of my bots would be entered. The judges should either have a degree in computer science and AI or experience of at least 5 years of bot programming creation or research.
The sponsors would have to donate at least 100 dollars per 3 months of advertising on the contest site. nothing under a 100 dollars will be considered to be a sponsor donation, however a donation of a smaller amount would be worth a small text link to the person donating the money for a period of 3 months.
It will be held at Chat Bot friends (
http://www.chatbotfriends.com ) of course. I will be adding more details at the end of next week.
sheryl