A.I.

On the 12th of October the Loebner Prize was awarded to Fred Roberts’ Elbot. This is a prize to the one who can come up with the best artificial intelligence program, and the criteria for winning is scoring high on the Turing test. This test was described by Alan Turing in 1950, and its basic principle is that a human judge engages in a normal conversation with one person and one machine (each attempting to appear human), and if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, the machine is said to have passed the test. Now, the Loebner Prize has a panel of 12 judges, and to pass their criteria, the machine/program only has to fool 4 (so 30%). This years gold medal was awarded, as said, to Elbot, but even so it only fooled 3 judges, and not 4. Still, I am amazed that 3 people did not realize this was a machine. Fred Roberts designed the program to make jokes about being a robot, and it was this apparent sense of humor that threw some of the judges off. I decided to have a chat with Elbot myself, and if you read on you can read the transcript. It’s pretty obvious it’s a program if you use somewhat intricate language, and not just the standard conversational stuff. But impressive none the less. Oh, you can also have a chat with Elbot here if you’d like (press the red button). 

Prize in Economics

The 2008 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences is awarded to:

Paul Krugman “for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity”

Krugman is a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton, and author of several books. 

Congratulations!

Bald Gene Discovered

A new study has identified two genetic variations in Caucasian men that correlate with a huge increase in the risk of baldness. The genetic variations were found on chromosome 20, and the research was conducted by scientists at McGill University, King’s College London and GlaxoSmithKline Inc. About 1/3 of all men will develop the common type of male baldness by the age of 45 (to varying degrees of course), and as the first step toward a treatment is to understand the mechanisms behind, this could potentially pave the way for “anti-bald” drugs in the future. A specific variant of the X-chromosome have also been shown to correlate with male baldness, and the researchers say that if you have both the genetic variations on chromosome 20 and the “bald” X-chromosome, your chances of becoming bald increases sevenfold.