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Where To Go From Here
=====================

   Now, you have learned enough to build your own application. You
could, for example, take part in the Loebner Contest to win $100,000.
The Loebner Prize is the first formal instantiation of a Turing Test.
Hugh Loebner agreed with The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies to
underwrite a contest designed to implement the Turing Test.  Dr.
Loebner pledged a Grand Prize of $100,000 for the first computer whose
responses were indistinguishable from a human's. Each year an annual
prize of $2000 and a bronze medal is awarded to the _most_ human
computer.  The winner of the annual contest is the best entry relative
to other entries that year, irrespective of how good it is in an
absolute sense. Here is an example of a conversation with the winning
program of 1997:

     (c)1997 Cambridge Center For Behavioral Studies all rights reserved [CONVERSE]
     [Intelligent Research Ltd.] Start at: [1997/04/29 08:59:40]
     PROGRAM[10:39:20]Hi, my name is Catherine, what's yours?
     JUDGE02[10:39:36]My name is Nathan.
     PROGRAM[10:39:37]Well, it's nice to meet you, Nathan.
     PROGRAM[10:39:45]Did you see that story on CNN last night about the lesbian
     PROGRAM[10:40:03]couple who came out at a White House party on Sunday?
     JUDGE02[10:40:45]No.  I'm sorry I missed that.  How did the Prez take it?
     PROGRAM[10:40:47]Ellen Degeneres was one of them - she was kissing her lover
     PROGRAM[10:41:08]in front of Bill Clinton. Do you think he was very
     PROGRAM[10:41:21]embarrassed?
     JUDGE02[10:41:37]You tell me.  I didn't see it.
     PROGRAM[10:41:38]Are you still a Friend of Bill Clinton?
     JUDGE02[10:42:22]Yes.  I would like to talk about something else.  Do you know anything about sculpture.
     PROGRAM[10:42:24]Well, I suppose he's doing his best like most of us, but he
     PROGRAM[10:42:35]does seem to attract an UNUSUAL amount of bad publicity,
     PROGRAM[10:42:51]wouldnt you say--can it all be bad luck?
     JUDGE02[10:43:20]I asked you if you knew anything about sculpture.
     PROGRAM[10:43:21]OK, but what happens now--does it all drift on, with
     PROGRAM[10:43:36]everyone waiting to see how much his friends have said about
     PROGRAM[10:43:47]him under threat of lots and lots of jail-or will something
     PROGRAM[10:44:01]dramatic actually happen?
     JUDGE02[10:44:19]Do you know what sculpture is?
     PROGRAM[10:44:20]Well, youre more a fan of his than I am I guess---though I
     PROGRAM[10:44:34]cant SWEAR what Id have done in that locked hotel room, I
     PROGRAM[10:44:51]must say.
     JUDGE02[10:45:26]Have you ever been to the Salmagundi Club?
     PROGRAM[10:45:29]Never. to go back to the original discussion Time to get
     PROGRAM[10:45:43]off this one I think and onto something more down to earth!
     JUDGE02[10:46:20]What is more down to earth than art?
     PROGRAM[10:46:21]I don't know what -- to be honest. -
     PROGRAM[10:46:30]I suppose it depends on where you're coming from, but as the
     PROGRAM[10:46:46]song goes in My Fair Lady, "Why can't a woman be more like a
     PROGRAM[10:47:03]man? "
     JUDGE02[10:47:52]I liked that song but I prefer "Why can't children be more like we are"
     JUDGE02[10:48:10]from another play the name of which I cannot remember.
     PROGRAM[10:48:12]What, if anything, do you enjoy about being a man?
     JUDGE02[10:49:01]I would enjoy all aspects of life no matter what my gender.
     PROGRAM[10:49:02]Do you think of yourself as being attractive?

   This program insists on always speaking about the same story around
Bill Clinton. You see, even a program with a rather narrow mind can
behave so much like a human being that it can win this prize. It is
quite common to let these programs talk to each other via network
connections. But during the competition itself, the program and its
computer have to be present at the place the competition is held. We
all would love to see a `gawk' program win in such an event. Maybe it
is up to you to accomplish this?

   Some other ideas for useful networked applications:
   * Read the file `doc/awkforai.txt' in the `gawk' distribution.  It
     was written by Ronald P. Loui (Associate Professor of Computer
     Science, at Washington University in St. Louis,
     <loui@ai.wustl.edu>) and summarizes why he teaches `gawk' to
     students of Artificial Intelligence. Here are some passages from
     the text:

          The GAWK manual can be consumed in a single lab session and
          the language can be mastered by the next morning by the
          average student.  GAWK's automatic initialization, implicit
          coercion, I/O support and lack of pointers forgive many of
          the mistakes that young programmers are likely to make.
          Those who have seen C but not mastered it are happy to see
          that GAWK retains some of the same sensibilities while adding
          what must be regarded as spoonsful of syntactic sugar.
          ...
          There are further simple answers.  Probably the best is the
          fact that increasingly, undergraduate AI programming is
          involving the Web.  Oren Etzioni (University of Washington,
          Seattle) has for a while been arguing that the "softbot" is
          replacing the mechanical engineers' robot as the most
          glamorous AI testbed.  If the artifact whose behavior needs
          to be controlled in an intelligent way is the software agent,
          then a language that is well-suited to controlling the
          software environment is the appropriate language.  That would
          imply a scripting language.  If the robot is KAREL, then the
          right language is "turn left; turn right." If the robot is
          Netscape, then the right language is something that can
          generate `netscape -remote
          'openURL(http://cs.wustl.edu/~loui)'' with elan.
          ...
          AI programming requires high-level thinking.  There have
          always been a few gifted programmers who can write high-level
          programs in assembly language.  Most however need the ambient
          abstraction to have a higher floor.
          ...
          Second, inference is merely the expansion of notation.  No
          matter whether the logic that underlies an AI program is
          fuzzy, probabilistic, deontic, defeasible, or deductive, the
          logic merely defines how strings can be transformed into
          other strings.  A language that provides the best support for
          string processing in the end provides the best support for
          logic, for the exploration of various logics, and for most
          forms of symbolic processing that AI might choose to call
          "reasoning" instead of "logic."  The implication is that
          PROLOG, which saves the AI programmer from having to write a
          unifier, saves perhaps two dozen lines of GAWK code at the
          expense of strongly biasing the logic and representational
          expressiveness of any approach.

     Now that `gawk' itself can connect to the Internet, it should be
     obvious that it is suitable for writing intelligent web agents.

   * `awk' is strong at pattern recognition and string processing.  So,
     it is well suited to the classic problem of language translation.
     A first try could be a program that knows the 100 most frequent
     English words and their counterparts in German or French. The
     service could be implemented by regularly reading email with the
     program above, replacing each word by its translation and sending
     the translation back via SMTP.  Users would send English email to
     their translation service and get back a translated email message
     in return. As soon as this works, more effort can be spent on a
     real translation program.

   * Another dialogue-oriented application (on the verge of ridicule)
     is the email "support service." Troubled customers write an email
     to an automatic `gawk' service that reads the email. It looks for
     keywords in the mail and assembles a reply email accordingly. By
     carefully investigating the email header, and repeating these
     keywords through the reply email, it is rather simple to give the
     customer a feeling that someone cares. Ideally, such a service
     would search a database of previous cases for solutions. If none
     exists, the database could, for example, consist of all the
     newsgroups, mailing lists and FAQs on the Internet.


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