Artificial stupidity

The saga of Hugh Loebner and his search for an intelligent bot has almost everything: Sex, lawsuits and feuding computer scientists. There's only one thing missing: Smart machines.

Editor's note: Part 1 of two parts

By John Sundman

Feb. 26, 2003 | All Hugh Loebner wanted to do was become world famous, eliminate all human toil, and get laid a lot. And he was willing to put up lots of good money to do so. He's a generous, fun-loving soul who likes to laugh, especially at himself. So why does everybody dislike him so much? Why does everybody give him such a hard time?

Actually, not everybody does dislike him. He is beloved among sex workers, of whose rights he is a tireless advocate. Loebner also has friends, or at least people willing to hang out with him for short intervals, among the eccentric group of self-tutored hackers and robot builders who participate in the annual competition for the Loebner Prize in artificial intelligence.

Since 1989 Loebner has spent, by his account, more than $200,000 and a thousand hours of unpaid time to hasten the arrival of intelligent machines. He has set aside a gold medal and $100,000 in cash for the creator of the first machine that can pass for human. In the meantime he gives out annual prizes for programs that come closest to a long-sought holy grail in the artificial intelligence community: passing the Turing test.

But Hugh Gene Loebner, a fast-talking hardware manufacturer who has a distracted air, a Ph.D. in sociology, and an intense devotion to what he calls WWS (wine, women and song), is assiduously avoided by virtually everybody who has helped him organize his contests over the past dozen years or so. He is considered pushy and unpleasant by some of his biggest fans. And he is anathema to the self-proclaimed leading lights of "real" A.I., who loathe Hugh Loebner with a passion that borders, ironically, on the irrational.

For example, MIT professor Marvin Minsky -- known by his disciples as the father of artificial intelligence -- calls Loebner's prize "obnoxious and stupid" and has offered a cash award of his own to anybody who can persuade Loebner to abolish his prize and go back to minding his own business. The mere mention of Loebner's name is sometimes enough to get the father of artificial intelligence talking about lawsuits.

It's easy to understand why contest organizers don't have much good to say about Dr. Loebner -- in their experience, he's a control freak and congenital, chronic pain in the ass. People say that the more you go out of your way to do Hugh Loebner a favor, the more he treats you like hired help. Even participants in past Loebner contests say similar things. But what can account for this passion of the academic A.I. community, for whose benefit Loebner took out a mortgage on his house to endow the $100,000 grand prize? All he wants to do is give them his money for work they were going to do anyway!

To win the Loebner competition, software programs must mimic human conversation. Such programs are known as "chatting robots" or, more often, "chatterbots" or simply "bots." But today's academic A.I. researchers consider the chatterbot approach simpleminded. The Loebner competition, they argue, isn't a real measure of progress in artificial intelligence but merely a "bot beauty contest." To mainstream researchers, Loebner is a self-aggrandizing fool and his contest is hokum: at best irrelevant and at worst a public disservice that encourages bad science.

Loebner contests are often farcical and Hugh Loebner does act foolishly. But the closer one looks at the history of the Loebner Prize, the more it appears that Loebner's real offense was showing up the biggest stars in "real" artificial intelligence as a bunch of phonies. Thirty years ago, Minsky and other A.I. researchers were declaring that the problem of artificial intelligence would be solved in less than a decade. But they were wrong, and every year the failure of computer programs to get anywhere close to winning the Loebner Prize underlines just how spectacularly off the mark they were.

Next page: Is this Alan Turing's legacy? A farce that no one will host?