LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL 2013 Loebner Prize Artificial Intelligence "The First Turing Test" US$ 6,000 and the Annual Bronze Medal The contest will be held under the aegis of Professor Paul Mc Kevitt of the University of Ulster. Location: Derry~Londonderry~LegenDerry, Northern Ireland, UK as part of the CultureTECH 2013 Festival, “City of Culture” Celebration & The Gathering Ireland. First Prize US$ 4000 + Annual Bronze Medal Second Prize US$ 1000 Third Prize US$ 750 Fourth Prize US$ 250 The Annual Loebner Prize is an unrestricted Turing Test. 1. Important Dates: Mon 13 May 2013 Opening date for receipt of entries  Mon 3 June 2013 Closing date for receipt of entries  Mon 24 June 2013 Announcement of 4 finalists selected Sat 14th September, 2013 Competition -Derry~LondonDerry~LegenDerry, Northern Ireland, UK Entries should be sent to: Prof. Paul Mc Kevitt School of Creative Arts & Technologies Faculty of Arts Computer Science Research Institute (CSRI) University of Ulster, Magee BT48 7JL, Derry/Londonderry NORTHERN IRELAND Date of mailing, and not date of receipt, will be used to determine priority. All entrants must submit their entries on CD, DVD or USB Flash media via a message service requiring a receipt signature and having a time/date stamp (E.g. Certified, Registered, DHL, FedEx, UPS, etc.). 1. Entrants may chose to allow Contest Management to install and test the programs. 2. Entrants may install their previously submitted programs at the testing site on a management supplied Windows OS computer. 3. Entrants may bring a computer to the testing site and install and run the programs at the testing site. Entrants choosing options 1 or 2 must submit programs that are able to run on Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 or Window 8 OS machines. If any entry succeeds in fooling at least 1/2 the judges into thinking it is the human when paired with at least 1/2 of the human confederates, $25,000 and the Silver Medal will be awarded and the competition will progress to the Audio Visual input phase. Entrants choosing options (2) or (3) must schedule the time/date of their appearance PRIOR to 13 May 2013 for testing at the mailing address given. The testing date must be between 13 May and 3 June 2013. Final Four entrants who chose submission option (1) do NOT have to be present at the competition. Those who choose options (2) or (3) MUST be present to install and operate their entries. No entry will be tested by contest management which does not provide, on the transmittal media, all necessary programs, interpreters, etc. (e.g. Perl, MySQL, etc.). Only the first 16 compliant entries will be evaluated in depth. This means that all entries will be tested in order of receipt for compliance with the rules. The 16 compliant entries having the earliest time stamps will be screened according to the criteria in point 4, below. If there is no compliant Entry for the 2013 Competition, the total $6000 prize money will be added to the 2014 Competition prize, and the 2014 Competition will be held under these rules, except that the venue for the 2014 may be different than that of the 2013 Competition.. All entrants must declare that they have intellectual rights to the submitted program, that they are not violating intellectual property rights by submitting any ancillary interpreters, data base systems, etc. 2: COMMUNICATIONS PROTOCOL. The Loebner Prize Protocol (LPP) will be used. Each Entry Program must communicate with a "Judge Communications" program in the following manner: The LPP is a character by character asynchronous communications protocol. Each program, upon startup, must provide a “browse” function to select a directory. Communications shall be by means of the creation, detection, and deletion of sub-directories within the specified communications directory. A. To simulate a key press the entry program must create a sub-directory within the communications directory with the following format: “sequence_number.key press-name.extension” a. Where sequence_number is unique and monotonically increasing both lexically and numerically. b. “keypress-name” is either a single letter (case sensitive) or the name of the special character, as appended to these rules. c. The extension is “.other” For example, were a program to create the following pattern of sub-directories: 0000000123.H.other 0000000235.e.other 0000000456.l.other 0000000789.l.other 0000000888.o.other 0000001234.comma.other 0000002222.space.other 0000002345.J.other 0000004567.i.other 0000006789.m.other 0000007777.period.other 0000008123.Return.other 0000010000.H.other 0000010001.o.other 0000010002.w.other 0000010005.space.other 0000020000.a.other 0000020001.r.other 0000020005.e.other 0000030000.space.other 0000030001.y.other 0000040000.o.other 0000050000.u.other 0000050010.question.other the program would have transmitted the utterance: Hello, Jim. How are you? The judge program will post the letters on the appropriate window in "real-time," that is as quickly as the operating system and program permit. Entrants may wish to incorporate a time delay between creating sub-directories (ie indicating key presses) to mimic typing. Sequence numbers themselves do not indicate more than the sequence of characters, not the inter-character timing. There are no restrictions on the sequence numbers except that they be monotonically increasing lexically and numerically. (i.e. 0001 0002 … 0010, 0011 Not 1, 2, 10, 11) B. To detect a key press by the judge, the program must detect, within the communications directory a sub-directory with the same format, but extension “.judge” and then must remove or delete the judge’s sub-directory from the communications directory. 3: INTERACTION SEQUENCE. Judges will begin each round by making initial comments with the entities. Upon receiving an utterance from a judge, the entities will respond. Judges will continue interacting with the entities for 25 minutes. At the conclusion of the 25 minutes, each judge will will declare one of the two entities to be the human. The both human and entry program must wait until the judge starts the interaction. Entries will be expected to respond to the judges' initial comment or question. There will be no restrictions on what names etc. the entries, humans, or judges can use, nor any other restrictions on the content of the conversations.  Contest management reserves the right to enter one or more publicly available open source programs. 4: SELECTING THE FINALISTS. The finalists will be chosen based upon ability to respond "intelligently" to a series of questions. The 4 entries with the highest scores will be selected as finalists. It is not necessary that a program be able to respond to the selection questions. If no entries can respond "intelligently" to these questions we will evaluate the entries on a general quality of responses. We will post the testing program shortly; however the entries must be capable of dealing with any form of input and any form of question which a "normal" human might be expected to deal with. The testing program may, or may not, terminate the utterances with periods, question marks, or returns. Appendix Names for special characters in LPP. Name Key braceleft '{', braceright '}', bracketleft '[', bracketright ']', parenleft '(', parenright ')', space ' ', comma ',', period '.', greater '>', less '<', slash '/', backslash '\', bar '|', quotedbl '"', quoteright "'", Tab "\t", equal '=', underscore '_', plus '+', minus '-', exclam '!', at '@', numbersign '#', dollar '$', percent '%', asterisk '*', asciicircum '^', asciitilde '~', quoteleft '`', ampersand '&', Return "\n", colon ":", semicolon ";", question "?", BackSpace "BackSpace" LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL