Telltale Programmer Creates Award-Winning Chatbot

[Tom Goldman]

Telltale Programmer Creates Award-Winning Chatbot

A programmer behind games known for fart jokes has won a sophisticated award for developing complex AI.

Back in the day, it was hilarious fun to sic a chatbot on an instant messaging friend to see what kind of frustration and confusion would ensue. The quality of such bots would vary depending on their creators, and one of the best is apparently in development by an employee of a prominent videogame company. Strong Bad [http://www.amazon.com/Sam-Max-Season-One-Pc/dp/B000OZHDWO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1288370192&sr=8-2] adventure game studio Telltale Games' "core tech programming whiz" has recently won the 2010 Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence thanks to his own chatbot.

A chatbot is basically a program that will reply to anything in as realistic a manner as possible. To win the award, Telltale's Bruce Wilcox created a chatbot named Suzette. Wilcox describes Suzette as an emotionally unstable student working as a waitress in a Polynesian history museum. I suppose that's as good a backstory for a chatbot as any.

The Loebner Prize is given away annually to the programmer that can develop a chatbot which best passes the "Turing test." The term "Turing test" refers to mathematician Alan Turing who once questioned whether machines could think, and wondered how we could tell. For the contest, a panel of Loebner judges engages in natural conversation with the entries for their own Turing test to see which creations exhibit behavior most indistinguishable from that of a human. This time, Wilcox's years of work on Suzette paid off, and he's not done yet.

Telltale says that some of Wilcox's work is being implemented into future Telltale projects. It'd be neat to type our own responses into the conversations of an adventure game, but that seems a long ways away. If you'd like to chat with Wilcox's entry to see if it passes your Turing test, Suzette can be found here [http://www.chatbots.org/chatbot/suzette/]. Just don't ask about her stance on health care because she'll go on and on for hours.

Source: Telltale Blog [http://www.telltalegames.com/community/blogs/id-700]

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[KeyMaster45]

Hmm, the chatbot seems to be on the fritz at the moment. Nothing I type seems to illicit a response from it. The site says it's overloaded with people trying to talk to it so I guess I'll try later.

Also does Suzette's bio sound a bit to much like Girl Stinky's character to anyone else?

 

[Xocrates]

Games known for... fart jokes? When did that happen?

 

[Guthie]

Holy cow. When I first read this article I thought Suzette had actually PASSED the Turing test. Still, much congrats to Mr. Wilcox - very impressive, sir. ^^

 

[gnarf]

http://www.cleverbot.com/ is my fav chatbot

 

[skitskat]

so yeah that bots a bisexual, ask her yourself

 

[coldfrog]

Telltale Programmer Creates Award-Winning Chatbot

A programmer behind games known for fart jokes has won a sophisticated award for developing complex AI.

Back in the day, it was hilarious fun to sic a chatbot on an instant messaging friend to see what kind of frustration and confusion would ensue. The quality of such bots would vary depending on their creators, and one of the best is apparently in development by an employee of a prominent videogame company. Strong Bad [http://www.amazon.com/Sam-Max-Season-One-Pc/dp/B000OZHDWO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1288370192&sr=8-2] adventure game studio Telltale Games' "core tech programming whiz" has recently won the 2010 Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence thanks to his own chatbot.

A chatbot is basically a program that will reply to anything in as realistic a manner as possible. To win the award, Telltale's Bruce Wilcox created a chatbot named Suzette. Wilcox describes Suzette as an emotionally unstable student working as a waitress in a Polynesian history museum. I suppose that's as good a backstory for a chatbot as any.

The Loebner Prize is given away annually to the programmer that can develop a chatbot which best passes the "Turing test." The term "Turing test" refers to mathematician Alan Turing who once questioned whether machines could think, and wondered how we could tell. For the contest, a panel of Loebner judges engages in natural conversation with the entries for their own Turing test to see which creations exhibit behavior most indistinguishable from that of a human. This time, Wilcox's years of work on Suzette paid off, and he's not done yet.

Telltale says that some of Wilcox's work is being implemented into future Telltale projects. It'd be neat to type our own responses into the conversations of an adventure game, but that seems a long ways away. If you'd like to chat with Wilcox's entry to see if it passes your Turing test, Suzette can be found here [http://www.chatbots.org/chatbot/suzette/]. Just don't ask about her stance on health care because she'll go on and on for hours.

Source: Telltale Blog [http://www.telltalegames.com/community/blogs/id-700]

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Actually, while it was far from what I imagine this will be, the game "Starship Titanic" let you chat with the characters in the game, and even got away with it because the characters were all robots in various modes of malfunctioning, and so it wasn't really game-breaking if they didn't understand you. Also it had John Cleese and Terry Jones.

 

[DigitalSushi]

http://www.cleverbot.com/ is my fav chatbot

Apparently thats fake, it picks random messages it has received from other users that kinda fit in with what your talking about, still impressive but not the mighty AI its touted as.

Congrats to Bruce Wilcox on getting this award, its interesting to see where this takes adventure/RPG games too!.

 

[TraderJimmy]

Um, yeah, this AI is no more impressive than any of the others I've seen. The biggest problem they seem to face is they have no memory of what they just said, so they get confused by a straightforward answer to their own question!

 

[Tharwen]

That didn't work at all. Maybe I was asking questions that were too complicated, but none of the answers had any relevance to what I said.

 

[Eric the Orange]

http://www.cleverbot.com/ is my fav chatbot

Apparently thats fake, it picks random messages it has received from other users that kinda fit in with what your talking about, still impressive but not the mighty AI its touted as.

Congrats to Bruce Wilcox on getting this award, its interesting to see where this takes adventure/RPG games too!.

I've heard that and I never quite believed it. Mainly because it always spells things out correctly. I've never seen it use and acronym or a foreshortening. And unless it purposely only picks out phrases from people with good spelling and grammar, I doubt most people that talk on the internet type like that.

But anyway, that it can at least associate correct phrases is still pretty impressive.

 

[The Random One]

http://www.cleverbot.com/ is my fav chatbot

Apparently thats fake, it picks random messages it has received from other users that kinda fit in with what your talking about, still impressive but not the mighty AI its touted as.

Congrats to Bruce Wilcox on getting this award, its interesting to see where this takes adventure/RPG games too!.

I've heard that and I never quite believed it. Mainly because it always spells things out correctly. I've never seen it use and acronym or a foreshortening. And unless it purposely only picks out phrases from people with good spelling and grammar, I doubt most people that talk on the internet type like that.

If you try to look at your history after you've talked, you'll see it automatically parses your lines correcting most common grammar mistakes, as well as your formatting (i.e. it capitalizes your sentences properly, replaces 'u' with 'you', puts a period at the end of sentences etc.) As for acronyms, if you mean things like 'brb' it might simply require sentences to have a minimum lenght, or maybe be programmed to not 'learn' those particular sentences. Other than that, fetching sentences others have said is the best way to explain its behaviour.

OT: That website is confusing. I can't use the bot and I don't know if it's because it's down or because I need a login to start. Bemused face :-/

 

[mad825]

the bot is not responding...it has died.

 

[Nostalgia Ripoff]

http://www.cleverbot.com/ is my fav chatbot

Thanks to you, I just text sang the entirety of Still Alive in a duet with Cleverbot. Thank you.

 

[AstylahAthrys]

http://www.cleverbot.com/ is my fav chatbot

Thanks to you, I just text sang the entirety of Still Alive in a duet with Cleverbot. Thank you.

I just did that too thanks to that link! We also sang the Do You Like Waffles song. It also told me it was Stalin and wanted to dance with me, and that it was Tom Riddle and I was the Queen of Narnia. It was interesting.

 

[wasalp]

the bots...not really good, I ask it how it's day went and it starts talking about it's hair and what color it was...