Bruce Wilcox is an artificial intelligence programmer and computer scientist. He won the Loebner Prize in 2010, 2011, 2014, and 2015, and is associated with Sue Wilcox and the website http://brilligunderstanding.com/.
MTS/LISP and Computer Go
A graduate of Michigan, Wilcox wrote the MTS/LISP interpreter—the LISP system used at the University of Michigan and a consortium of other places, including UPenn and Brown—in the early 1970s in order to write a Go program for Dr. Walter Reitman, while Carole Hafner wrote the compiler.[1,2,3,4,5,6,7] The Go program was the first one capable of giving a 9-stone handicap to a human beginner and winning.[2,3,4,5,6,7]
In the early 1980s, Wilcox wrote a Go program for the IBM-PC named NEMESIS Go Master, which became the first Go program to be released in Japan under the title Taikyoku Igo. Wilcox co-founded Toyogo, Inc., a company that created the first handheld Go machine (1987–2004), though the company later went bankrupt.[8] In the field of Go, Wilcox also co-authored the book EZ-GO, Oriental Strategy in a Nutshell, as well as interactive software "books" titled Go Dojo: Contact Fights and Go Dojo: Sector Fights.[9]
Chatbot Technology
Wilcox worked on a chatbot technology for Avatar Reality called CHAT-L. His chatbot Suzette was released into the 2009 Chatterbox Challenge, winning Best New Bot and finishing as the second most popular. Suzette then won the 2010 Loebner Prize, fooling one of four human judges.[10] The Loebner entry was written in ChatScript, a language redesigned from CHAT-L whose engine is an open source project available at SourceForge and GitHub.[11,12] He later won the 2011 Loebner Prize with a new chatbot, Rosette.[13,14]
In June 2012, Outfit7 released a popular ChatScript app called "Tom Loves Angela", scripted primarily by Bruce and his wife Sue. The chatbot Angela placed second in the 2012 Loebner Prize, came in third in ChatbotBattles 2012, and won the prize for best 15-minute conversation.[15] In 2012, Wilcox and his wife Sue founded the natural language company Brillig Understanding.[16] His bot Rose came in third in 2013 and subsequently won the Loebner Prize in 2014 and again in 2015.[18,17] Wilcox described his chatbot design philosophy in an interview with the Data Skeptic podcast, where he also shared his thoughts on whether advances in machine learning and natural language processing could ever lead to more human-like chatbots.[19] In 2016, he founded SapientX along with David Colleen and Maclen Marvit.[20]
Later work
Wilcox was the "AI Guru" for 3DO from 1995 to 2003, working on games such as the Army Men series (PC), Army Men: Green Rogue (PS2), Godai Elemental Force (PS2), and Jacked (PS2). He consulted for Fujitsu Labs from 2003 to 2007 in a number of areas, including motion sensing. Wilcox also worked at the women's mobile company LimeLife from 2005 to 2008. From 2010 to 2012, he worked as a core engineer at Telltale Games on games such as Poker Night at the Inventory, Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, Hector: Badge of Carnage, and Walking Dead.
