George, a Jabberwacky personality, has been selected to compete in the finals of the British Computer Society Machine Intelligence Prize, taking place in Cambridge on December 13th 2005.

The event takes the form of a 15 minute demonstration, followed by a vote amongst all present.

2005 Competition Finalists: http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/chrisn/micomp/2005.html

In an earlier paper we proposed a variant on Alan Turing's Imitation Game. For the new Impersonation Game a machine must adopt the persona of a human individual and convince the judge either that it 'is' that person, or at least create sufficient uncertainty that the judge says 'I don't know'.

We now propose a control experiment - humans impersonating humans - to determine how many of the proposed 100 Impersonation Games must be won to pass the Personal Turing Test.

We also announce a new, funded project called Pasion to further social presence research, which may help to lead to techniques of passing the Personal Turing Test.

An addendum by Rollo Carpenter of Jabberwacky, and Jonathan Freeman of i2 media research, Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths College, University of London

Addendum as a web page: http://www.jabberwacky.com/pttaddendum

Addendum as a pdf: http://www.jabberwacky.com/s/pttaddendum.pdf

Start creating Your Bot - your persona: http://www.jabberwacky.com/yourbot

An informal one-day meeting will be held at the University of Surrey, Guildford, UK, at which invited speakers will give short presentations on aspects of conversational systems and participants will demonstrate their developed and experimental programs.

Keynote Address: The History of ALICE and AIML , by Dr Richard S Wallace
A Very Personal Entertainment, by Rollo Carpenter
Multifaceted Conversational Systems, by Robby Garner
Purposes and Structure of Conversations, by David and Lynne Hamill
Chatterbots: Past, Present and Future, by Simon Laven
Comments on the Turing Test and the Loebner Prize, by Hugh Loebner
The Secret Life of a Mohawk Virtual Human, by Mrs Monica Peters
Automated Testing Tools for Chatterbot Development, by Dr Vladimir Veselov
Emotion Semantics in Conversational Linguistics, by Chris Ward

Colloquium Details: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/dwrc/Events/Colloquium.pdf

George, the chatbot who doesn't think he's a computer.

BBC World Service radio interview, availalble as a stream (George and Rollo feature at about 11 minutes in) and as a podcast (at about 13 minutes in).

The Go Digital page: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/1478157.stm

The mp3: godigital_20051017-1700_40_st.mp3

Say hello to George, the computing world's answer to Michael Parkinson. Try some philosophy on him and see if you don't fall for his charm (Q: "What is the meaning of life?" George: "To do your best in every respect").

In real life, as we all know, most automatons prove to be automorons. "Thank you for calling AnyCo," drones a digital voice. "Please press 1 on your telephone."

Full Sunday Times story: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,19510-1827281,00.html