Robby Garner
Robby Garner (b. 1963) is a natural language programmer and software developer. He won the 1998 and 1999 Loebner Prize Contests with the program called Albert One, and is currently living in Cedartown, Georgia He is listed in the 2001 Guinness Book of World Records as having written the "most human" computer program.
Garner considers himself to be 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. The stimulus response model was an inspiration for Dr. Richard S. Wallace's ALICE project.
Garner competed in six Loebner Prize contests, using 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 One, 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.
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 with Paco Nathan.
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. Albert One and Ella are examples of multifaceted conversational systems
Garner's most recent work 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 test featuring four of the top Loebner Prize Contest competitors. Ironically, Albert One is still a superior program to anything Garner has developed since, even though only a handful of people have actually seen it or conversed with it. A derivative program called Albert2 was written as an attempt to get a similar variety of response methods as a single executable program. Albert2 was made available briefly from Garner's web page, but soon became the prototype for HuMimics' "Web One" and was eventually abandoned by Garner when HuMimics closed down in 2003.