From these bags of tricks, we can learn a lot about, if not AI, at least humans. My favorite example in that category is MGonz [1]:

    "In 1989 MGonz was able to fool a human subject for over an hour [...]
    MGonz worked on a simple principle: don’t reply to statements. Merely
    insult the person making the statement. Most of MGonz’s one-liners are
    too profane to repeat – but “ah, type something interesting or shut-up”,
    “what sort of idiot types something like that”, and “that’s it, I’m not
    talking to you anymore!” are fairly representative of the style. The
    programme simply pours a torrent of abuse on the unwitting human at the
    other end of the internet connection."

[1] http://www.saintsandsceptics.org/the-mgonz-test/

Someone should create a reddit bot and see if anyone at all notices that it's a bot.

There are novelty accounts that only provide praise, so perhaps a nice version could also be created too.

> because they often use huge databases of real human responses to construct their own

Honestly, this often seems to be the conversational gambit of human beings.

Coming up with genuinely interesting conversation seems to be a task that takes too much effort for most everyday interactions.

Whether it be standard small chat, quoting cultural media, or reciting social group in-jokes, much of human interaction seems to also take a "bags of tricks" approach.

But how does yet another "bags of tricks" chatbot help to advance the field of AI? The Turing test and projects like this are a distraction on what should be our true goal of creating general AI. There is a large amount of evidence in neuroscience on the plasticity and uniformity of the neocortex, all pointing to a single algorithm for general intelligence.

I would much rather see a prize for finding more general purpose algorithms and using them to create general purpose AIs. Off the top of my head, show a picture a animal, building, logo, face, word, etc., and be able to pick out that same type from another group of pictures. Google has already demonstrated that we can teach a computer to recognize a cat with thousands of pictures and deep learning models, how about just one? The more general the test, the better, it should also be able to be trained to play new games and recognize sounds as well as pictures. Unlike another useless,specialized chatbot, this would be better aligned with Xprize's goals of "encouraging technological development that could benefit mankind."

That may be true, but at best you would just get animal level intelligence. We haven't refined our algorithms like evolution has over millions of years with natural selection, and we have far less computing power and far less training time than real brains.

Most animals can't learn language, or play games, and aren't very intelligent.

I recently watched a video with Stanford AI researchers talking about how the general case of searching for an object like a coffee cup in office is still an unsolved problem. At the same time, my German Shepherd with a pea sized mammalian brain has learned to pick up garbage when we go on nature hikes. After pointing out enough plastic bags, cups, cans, etc., she's somehow learned the concept of trash in the forest and will often find it on her own and bring it to me. Advancing AI to this level, would be a worthy goal.

Sure, but my point is it still wouldn't be able to complete the challenge.

The current rules are just meant as a high level baseline to start a discussion around designing the competition and the announcement was a call for people to do just that. An XPRIZE can take several months to years going through a design process before finalizing the rules. During that time domain experts are consulted to help define the competition.

My first conversation with Cleverbot:

User: Hi Cleverbot.

Cleverbot: How are you?

User: Fine. Let's talk Physics.

Cleverbot: Okay. Do you like trees?

User: That's a weird non-sequitur. Are familiar with Classical Mechanics?

Cleverbot: No.

User: It's just part of the physics we learn in high-school.

Cleverbot: Ich leibe tokio hotel.

I attempted to use the voice of Lieutenant Data from Startrek The Next Generation to interact with the Internet facing Cleverbot interface. I regret to inform, HN, that Cleverbot performed worse than anticipated.

I did, however, witness some potentially interesting if antiquated webdesign, not least a promotion for a potentially more human-like 'friend finder', located at the base of the page. It has 199k 'likes', 20.7k 'follows' and 22.2k 'shares', leading to a strong possibility Cleverbot is merely a pseudo-presence, and the true nature of this website will transpire only by clicking more deeply.

Did you read the same article as me? From what I could gather, it's more of a challenge in robotics. Nothing seemed to indicate that the speech should be machine generated. Rather it's a matter of making a robot charismatic/impressive enough to engage the audience.

This prize doesn't seem very useful to me. If someone actually was able to pull this off, they would be better off making billions off of that tech in the marketplace instead...

I'm not sure that this is a problem.

Even if the winner is a bag of tricks trick, it still would be something new in the way it is presented, with new tricks developed, and thereby surely would spark some innovation, would it not?

If so, then the XPrize served its purpose - to drive innovation.

I am not under the impression that XPrizes are intended to be impossible goals or "holy grails" - just goals that drive progress.

I respectfully disagree. As far as I understand, it is not about Q&A/jeopardy kind of context. It's about generating a TED speech that would involve deep domain expertise but more importantly tone and speech technics to make it great to hear...

What is preventing them from just playing back a pre recorded speech from a human?

The topic isn't known in advance. The robot has to prepare a speech on a specified topic without human interaction.