Finalists Named for Bletchley Park Turing Test Competition The four finalists have been selected for the 2012 Loebner Prize competition to find the world’s best conversational computer program. These programs, known as “chatbots”, will be competing for a bronze medal and a prize fund of $7,000 (currently about £4,400), sponsored by Dr Hugh Loebner who founded the competition in 1990. This year’s contest forms part of the celebrations for the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing. The finalists are: Marshall Allan (Australia), Daniel Burke (UK), Mohan Embar (USA) and the winner in both 2010 and 2011, Bruce Wilcox (USA). The Loebner Prize competition is based on the Turing Test, one of the biggest challenges in the world of Artificial Intelligence. The test was proposed by Alan Turing in a 1950 paper entitled Computing Machinery and Intelligence, as a way of determining whether a computer program could be said to be intelligent. The judges at the competition will conduct conversations with the competing chatbots and with some human surrogates, and will then rank all their conversation partners from most humanlike to least humanlike. The chatbot with the highest overall ranking wins the first prize and the medal. The Turing Centenary Loebner Prize competition will take place on May 15th 2012 at Bletchley Park Museum, starting at 1pm, and is being organized by Dr David Levy, twice winner of the prize. For more information visit http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html or contact Dr Levy at [email protected] (telephone 07717 220816) - ENDS - .