St Mary’s Academic Competes Against Artificial Intelligence in Loebner Prize

A specialist in emerging technologies at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, has pitted herself against a series of computer programmes to test the ability of Artificial Intelligence to mimic human behaviour as part of the annual Loebner Prize 2014. The Prize is based on one of the biggest challenges for Artificial Intelligence, the Turing Test, and saw St Mary’s Programme Director for Philosophy Dr Yasemin J Erden along with three other confederates (otherwise known as humans) conduct conversations with four judges, alongside four finalist ‘chatbots’. The conversations, which lasted 25 minutes, were judged by a panel including BBC’s Top Gear presenter James May to decide which was the human and which was the computer. Dr Erden said, “The task used during the Prize competition was not difficult and, unsurprisingly, the humans won. Programs are not yet so adept at natural language manipulation, and show this by asking questions like ‘do you prefer bananas or spanners?’.” The Loebner Prize 2014 was held at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, which was the base for Alan Turing and his code-cracking team during the Second World War. It was then Turing who developed this idea of a test for intelligence in 1951.