The Loebner Prize, based on a fund of over $100,000 established by New York businessman Hugh G. Loebner, is awarded annually for the computer program that best emulates natural human behavior. During the contest, a panel of independent judges attempts to determine whether the responses on a computer terminal are being produced by a computer or a person, along the lines of the Turing Test. The designers of the best program each year win a cash award and a medal. If a program passes the test in all its particulars, then the entire fund will be paid to the program's designer and the fund abolished. For further information about the Loebner Prize, see the URL http://info.acm.org/~loebner/loebner-prize.htmlx or write to Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, 11 Waterhouse Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, or call 617-491-9020. The BEAM Robot Olympics is a robot exhibition/competition started in 1991. For more information about the competition, write to BEAM Robot Olympics, c/o: Mark W. Tilden, MFCF, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L-3G1, 519-885-1211 x2454, mwtilden@watmath.uwaterloo.ca. The Gordon Bell Prize competition recognizes outstanding achievements in the application of parallel processing to practical scientific and engineering problems. Entries are considered in performance, price/performance, compiler parallelization and speedup categories, and a total of $3,000 will be awarded. The prizes are sponsored by Gordon Bell, a former National Science Foundation division director who is now an independent consultant. Contestants should send a three- or four-page executive summary to 1993 Gordon Bell Prize, c/o Marilyn Potes, IEEE Computer Society, 10662 Los Vaqueros Cir., PO Box 3014, Los Alamitos, CA 90720-1264, before May 31, 1993. AAAI has an annual robot building competition. The anonymous FTP site for the contest is/was aeneas.mit.edu:/pub/ACS/6.270/AAAI/ This site has the manual and the rules. To be added to the rbl-94@ai.mit.edu mailing list for discussing the AAAI robot building contest, send mail to rbl-94-request@ai.mit.edu. See also the 6.270 robot building guide in part 4 of this FAQ. The International Computer Chess Association presents an annual prize for the best computer-generated annotation of a chess game. The output should be reminiscent of that appearing in newspaper chess columns, and will be judged on both the correctness and depth of the variations and also on the quality of the program's written output. The deadline is December 31, 1994. For more information, write to Tony Marsland <tony@cs.ualberta.ca>, ICCA President, Computing Science Department, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada T6G 2H1, call 403-492-3971, or fax 403-492-1071.Go Back Up