I was to find out that the most thoughtful critiques of the Loebner contest come not from the IBM/ACM camp, or feuding lawyers, but from Loebner participants, especially its winners. They told me that the main problem with the Loebner contest is Hugh Loebner. Ever since the Shieber-Dennett-Minsky defection, each annual contest has been run by a different institution, with a different competition committee that must start from scratch. There is little or no organizational memory to the contest, and much micromanagement by Loebner himself.

Loebner denies that he meddles; he told me repeatedly that his only concern is that the contest be held and that he is happy to empower each contest committee with full authority. However, the stipulation placed on his gift says that the contest rules must be acceptable to him, and he certainly has made his opinions known about them. I was not able to find a single person to agree with him about his role in the contests.

You can't do too much research into recent Loebner competitions without coming upon the enigma that is Dr. Richard Wallace. He's known as the founder of the ALICE foundation and the creator of the open-source AIML free software. He's also known as a seriously odd person. "He's one stoned hippie," one person told me. "His ideas are bizarre, even in a universe of bizarre ideas," somebody else said. "That ALICE guy? He's a nut. I mean it. A nut."

Wallace, according to his official biography, is severely mentally ill:

"Richard Wallace is Information Technology Committee Chairman for 350 Divisadero St., a medical cannabis patient services organization. Wallace was diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder in 1992, and became functionally disabled in 1999. He cares for sick and dying patients every day, and provides critically needed technical assistance to the Center."

So I'll admit that I put off getting in touch with him and even considered not contacting him at all. I figured that I had already interviewed enough eccentrics for five good articles and needn't subject myself to any more. But then I read a long and compelling interview with him on the geek news site Slashdot.

In keeping with Wallace's reputation for eccentricity, the article -- which is mostly about A.I. and the Turing test -- contains a long and dense discussion of a recent court case that resulted in a restraining order being issued against him at the behest of a former close friend. I found that odd, but his discussion of his ALICE philosophy was cogent and interesting, and it held implications for what the Loebner competition's continued existence could signify, behind all the ongoing foofooraw.

Wallace's theory of A.I. is no theory at all. It's not that he doesn't believe in artificial intelligence, per se; rather, he doesn't much believe in intelligence, period. In a way that oddly befits a contest sponsored by a bunch of Skinnerians, Wallace's ALICE program is based strictly on a stimulus-response model. You type something in, if the program recognizes what you typed, it picks a clever, appropriate, "canned" answer.

There is no representation of knowledge, no common-sense reasoning, no inference engine to mimic human thought. Just a very long list of canned answers, from which it picks the best option. Basically, it's Eliza on steroids.

Conversations with ALICE are "stateless"; that is, the program doesn't remember what you say from one conversational exchange to the next. Basically it's not listening to a word you say, it's not learning a thing about you, and it has no idea what any of its own utterances mean. It's merely a machine designed to formulate answers that will keep you talking. And this strategy works, Wallace says, because that's what people are: mindless robots who don't listen to each other but merely regurgitate canned answers.

I reached Wallace while he was staying with friends in the Netherlands. There was loud techno music playing in the background as we spoke, but he himself was very soft-spoken, polite, funny, and friendly -- even further from Hugh Loebner than Dwight Harshberger of the Cambridge Center.

I asked him where he got the inspiration for ALICE. He said that he had been influenced by the "minimalist" A.I. ideas associated with Dr. Rodney Brooks of MIT's A.I. lab.

At first, he said, he had tried to follow some of the more grandiose theories of traditional A.I., but he found them sterile. "You read a book with a title like 'Consciousness Explained,'" he said, "and you expect to find some kind of instruction manual, something that you can use to build a consciousness. But of course it's nothing of the kind." (Daniel Dennett wrote "Consciousness Explained.")

Well, I asked him, what was his explanation of consciousness? He said he did not have a theory, other than that maybe there was no such thing as consciousness in the first place. Maybe it was just a word, a social construction. But, I objected, I certainly perceive myself as conscious in talking with you. Don't you feel conscious talking with me? Yes, he said, but maybe that was just the robot's way of handling unfamiliar data.

We talked a little more about what it means to be human; he was very modest on the subject. Finally I asked him about the Loebner Prize, and in particular, about Loebner's insistence that the competition be held every year, in the face of arguments from people like Shieber and Dennett that it be not be an annual thing. "Well," Dr. Wallace said, "the annual Loebner Prize certainly motivated me."

And then we said goodbye.

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