The Loebner Prize

The Loebner Prize is a competition in the spirit of the Turing Test.  Participants are welcome to submit conversational agent software to be judged by a panel of humans.  This episode includes interviews with Charlie Maloney, a judge in the Loebner Prize, and Bruce Wilcox, a winner of the Loebner Prize.

Guests

Charlie Maloney

Bruce Wilcox: A graduate of Michigan, Wilcox wrote the MTS/LISP interpreter (the LISP system used at the University of Michigan and a consortium of other places including UPenn and Brown) back in the early 1970s,[1] in order to be able to write a Go program for Dr. Walter Reitman. (Carole Hafner wrote the compiler.) The Go program was the first one to be able to give a 9-stone handicap to a human beginner and win.[2][3][4][5][6][7] He wrote a Go program for the IBM-PC in the early 80's called NEMESIS Go Master, which became the first Go program to be released in Japan (as Taikyoku Igo). Wilcox co-founded Toyogo, Inc., a company that created the first handheld Go machine (1987–2004). The company later went bankrupt.[8] In the field of Go, Wilcox co-authored a book called EZ-GO, Oriental Strategy in a Nutshell,[9] and interactive software "books" Go Dojo: Contact Fights and Go Dojo: Sector Fights.