91É«ÇéƬ

EACH year Hugh Loebner offers a $100 000 prize for anyone producing a
program that passes this test. This year a British program came closest. Read a
transcript of its rather single-minded conversation on the Loebner pages at
http://acm.org/~loebner/loebner-prize.html. You can’t converse with it yourself
just yet, but if you want to try talking to several different programs written
by last year’s prizewinner, they are available at
http://ciips.ee.uwa.edu.au/~hutch/hal/. If you are feeling nostalgic, have a chat
with Eliza at http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza/eliza.html. Eliza was state-of-the-art
in 1966, but she is a bit behind the times now.