In the 2012 Bot Prize competition, the true winner may be the one who makes the most mistakes. In this match, video game avatars directed by artificial intelligence compete to see which comes across as most human in a fight against real human players. This year, for the first time, human participants mistook the two bots for humans more than half the time, a feat researchers attribute to the fact that these bots were programmed to be less-than-perfect players. During the game, the aptly named "Unreal Tournament 2004
," players, of course, try to kill each other, but they also categorize each character they meet as either bot or human. As they move through their virtual world, they use what's called a judgment gun to tag the figures they encounter, and these scores, or humanness ratings, determine the winners of the competition. Since the competition started, in 2008, the goal ...
