Bletchley Park to host Loebner prize competition

A competition to find the best conversational computer programme will be hosted by the Bletchley Park Trust. As part of the 2012 celebrations for the Alan Turing centenary, the Trust is delighted to be hosting the annual Loebner Prize competition. The chatbot programmes will be competing for a coveted bronze medal and a prize fund of $7,000 sponsored by Dr Hugh Loebner who founded the competition twenty years ago. 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 his famous 1950 paper entitled Computing Machinery and Intelligence, as a way of determining whether a computer programme could be said to be intelligent.