Robby Garner
Encyclopedia
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
programmer and software developer. He won the 1998 and 1999 Loebner Prize
Loebner prize
The Loebner Prize is an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awards prizes to the chatterbot considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The format of the competition is that of a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge simultaneously holds textual conversations...
Contests with the program called Albert One
Albert one
Albert One is an AI chatterbot bot created by Robby Garner and designed to mimic the way humans make conversations using a multi-faceted approach in natural language programming.-History:...
. He is listed in the 2001 Guinness Book of World Records as having written the "most human" computer program.
Life
A native of Cedartown, GeorgiaCedartown, Georgia
Cedartown is a city in Polk County, Georgia, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 9,750. The city is the county seat of Polk County...
, Robby attended Cedartown High School. He worked in his father's television repair shop and began programming for his family's business at age 15. Forming a software company called Robitron Software Research, Inc. in 1987 with his father, Robert J. Garner, and his sister Pam, he worked as a software developer until 1997 when his father retired and the company was disbanded.
Early Conversational Systems
One of the first web chatterbots, named Max Headcold, was written by Garner in 1995. Max served two purposes, to collect data about web chat behavior and to entertain customers of the FringeWare online bookstore. This program was eventually implemented as a Java package called JFRED, written by Paco NathanPaco Nathan
Paco Nathan is a computer scientist, author, and performance art show producer from San Luis Obispo, California, who established much of his career in Austin, Texas....
based on the C++ FRED CGI program, and his own influences from Stanford and various corporations. Garner and Nathan took part in the world's largest online Turing test in 1998. Their JFRED program was perceived as human by 17% of the participants.
Philosophy and Collaborations
A computational behaviorist after the term coined by Dr. Thomas Whalen in 1995, Garner's first attempts at simulating conversation involved collections of internet chat viewed as a sequence of stimuli and responses. Kevin Copple of Ellaz Systems has collaborated with Garner on several projects, including Copple's Ella, for which, Garner contributed voice recordings and music. Garner and Copple believe that intelligence may be built one facet at a time, rather than depending on some general purpose theory to emerge.The Loebner Prize Contest
Competing in six Loebner Prize contests, he used the competition as a way to test his prototypes on the judges each year. After winning the contest twice in 1998 and 1999 with his program called Albert OneAlbert one
Albert One is an AI chatterbot bot created by Robby Garner and designed to mimic the way humans make conversations using a multi-faceted approach in natural language programming.-History:...
, he began collaborating with other software developers in a variety of conversational systems. Having won the contest through incremental improvement to his own system, Garner attributes his success to the same principle that says intelligence may be acquired one facet at a time. Garner created the Robitron Yahoo Group in 2002 as a forum and virtual watering hole for Loebner Prize Contest participants and discussion of related topics.
Current Works
The multifaceted approach, presented at a colloquium on conversational systems in November 2005, involves multiple chat bots working under the control of a master control program. Using this technique, the strengths of various web agents may be united under the control of a Java applet or servlet. The control program categorizes stimuli and delegates responses to other programs in a hierarchy. A spin-off of this technique is the Turing Hub, an automated Turing testTuring test
The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. In Turing's original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All...
featuring four of the top Loebner Prize Contest competitors.
See also
- FREDFred Chatterbot-History:The name Fred was initially suggested by Karen Lindsey, and then Robby jokingly came up with an acronym, "Functional Response Emulation Device." Fred has also been implemented as a Java application by Paco Nathan called ....
- Rollo CarpenterRollo CarpenterRollo Carpenter is the British-born creator of Jabberwacky and Cleverbot, learning Artificial Intelligence software. Carpenter has worked as CTO of a business software startup in Silicon Valley, but returned to the UK to work at Icogno....
- Paco NathanPaco NathanPaco Nathan is a computer scientist, author, and performance art show producer from San Luis Obispo, California, who established much of his career in Austin, Texas....
- Dr Richard WallaceRichard Wallace (scientist)Richard Wallace is the author of AIML and Botmaster of ALICE . Dr. Wallace's work has appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, CNN, ZDTV and in numerous foreign language publications across Asia, Latin America and Europe.Richard Wallace was born in Portland, Maine in 1960. He earned his Ph.D...