From: Gary Miller (garymiller@starband.net)
Date: Tue Apr 01 2003 - 09:24:43 MST
Dear Friends,
Sorry to bother all of you. My apologies in advance if any of you
consider this spam.
But I just wanted to share some really good news with all of you and ask
you all a really big favor.
As many of you know I have been working on an intelligent bot using AI
technology which I developed for quite some time.
To refresh your memory a bot is a program that has a large knowledge
base and attempts to chat in English as a human would.
That work is now beginning to pay off for me.
I have just take third place in the judges competition of the 2003
ZabaWare Chatbot Challenge with my entry Project Zandra.
This is a competition which had 88 contestants this year from all over
the world.
Many of the entries have been competing for several years and some are
the product of large development teams.
So while I obviously would have liked to take first place, third place
and a Bronze Medal was still a very significant victory for me
But there is another judging category just beginning to take place in
the contest.
It is a voting by the general public. That is where the favor comes
in...
Please visit the site at http://www.chatterboxchallenge.com/ and vote
for some of the bots.
You can vote for more than one bot grading them on a 1 to 10 score with
10 being the best.
There are two categories to vote in Best Overall Bot and Most Humorous
Bot.
And my bot is Project Zandra - Gary Miller.
A little about my bot. My bot tries very hard to be human. In many
case he can recognize your input even if words are mispelled. His
knowledge spreads across many different domains general knowledge,
animals, space, history, geography. But since I can't teach it
everything at once I have tried to give it the most commonly known
knowledge first and will add deeper domain knowledge at time goes on.
My bot attempt to extract information from the conversation and use that
information to provide context for the understanding of future
responses. My bot accesses a personality matrix that uses over 800
variables to define it's life. Every thing from parents, girlfriend, to
it's favorite pizza toppings.
I know most of you do not believe that bot technology will ever lead to
the Singularity directly, but I ask you to keep an open mind in the next
few years. I am hoping that the publicity of winning the contest will
help interest some company in implementing a commercial bot based on my
technology. This would in fact help fund my research and allow me to
add additional knowledge engineers. Someday I envision technology like
this coupled with good voice recognition and speech generation to allow
you to ask your PDA or Cell Phone any question known to man and receive
a instant verbal response. While this might not create the singularity
it is my hope that technology such as this will make the worlds
information more instantly accessable to everyone thus accelerating
change further...
Thank you again for your bandwidth, and hopefully your votes...
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