Jimmy: Searching for Free-Will (A Competition)

In this invited paper we describe a competition that aims to engage a wide section of society in the exploration of the future nature of technology. In particular the competition will examine one of the most controversial aspects of Artificial Intelligence, specifically the concept of freewill. What is freewill? Can machines achieve it? What are the consequences for society should that happen? These are just some of the tantalising questions that flow from such a vision. For this competition, we roll back to a more basic stage and explore the basic issues of trying to construct a robot controller that displays behaviour that is analogous to freewill. We do this by offering a set of online tools that enable participants in the competition to create a bespoke controller for a simulated robot “Jimmy”; a waiter working in a futuristic bar set in a virtual world. This paper explains the motivation, design, implementation and rules for this competition