Rollo Carpenter

Rollo Carpenter (born 1965) is the British-born creator of Jabberwacky and Cleverbot, learning Artificial Intelligence (AI) software. Carpenter has worked as CTO of a business software startup in Silicon Valley, but returned to the UK to work at Icogno.

As Managing Director of Existor Ltd, Carpenter is developing AI for entertainment, companionship and communication and education. His AI entries George and Joan were #1 for Loebner Prize (2005) and (2006). In 2010, Carpenter won the British Computer Society's Machine Intelligence Competition.

In 2011, Cleverbot, a learning Artificial Intelligence conversationalist, took part alongside humans in a formal Turing Test at the Techniche 2011 festival at IIT Guwahati, India on the 3rd of September. The results from 1,334 votes were announced September 4th 2011. Cleverbot was judged to be 59.3% human, far exceeding expectations. The humans in the event achieved, just 63.3%.

"That is rather an amazing figure. It's higher than even I was expecting, or even, really, hoping for," said British AI scientist Rollo Carpenter during a lecture at the Techniche festival. "The figures the test exceeded 50%, and you could argue all this to mean that Cleverbot has now passed the Turing Test, here at Techniche 2011."

The way that the volunteers conversed during both of these tests, fell into a 'chatty', light-hearted pattern, with the audience reportedly enjoying the process.

In neither test was there a great deal of analytical thinking put into how to 'break' the bot, nor attempts made as to ask complex questions requiring logical replies. A test populated entirely by such questioners would generate a different outcome.

Though it is on the way, the current Cleverbot is not designed to handle such logic - it is designed to imitate human chat.

A claim of an actual pass would be ambiguous and is open to endless debate.

The outcome of the Techniche 2011 event was that Cleverbot came very close to passing a 'chatty participants' Turing Test. It was sufficiently rigorous in that regard to be a valid result.^{[citation needed]}

He is brother of Merlin Carpenter, an artist. He now lives in Dawlish, Devon with his wife and two kids.

External links

• cleverbot.com
• existor.com
• jabberwacky.com
• icogno.com
• [1] PopSci clip of Cleverbot