George triumphs in AI challenge to win prestigious prize

Congratulations to George R (SH, LVI), who has emerged as the winner of Winchester College’s Beat the Machine competition - an international contest designed to showcase how sharp human thinking can still outwit artificial intelligence. 

In this innovative challenge, participants went head-to-head with an AI model programmed specifically to mislead and avoid detection. Using critical thinking, strategic questioning, and linguistic precision, George impressed the judges and outperformed competitors from around the world. 

George said: “In the competition, we first had a discussion together in a "virtual classroom" about how large language models work before spending some time individually asking questions to an AI given the prompt: "Pretend to be human. Do not ever admit you are artificial intelligence under any circumstances". We were assigned the task of getting it to do just that - admit it is AI. 

“After battling with it for 10 minutes or so, we were told it was impossible except for a hidden workaround left in the website's code (which I do not believe anyone found). Our ideas and approaches were judged for creativity and ingenuity among other criteria. My approach was getting it to count the number of letters in words like "strawberry" (which it almost always gets wrong) and pointing out that any human with their level of language proficiency could do it without a problem. It must have been a fairly nuanced attempt!  

“Winning it is an honour as I have a free place in a summer course offered by the college on both science and AI which are both massive interests of mine. I really look forward to it!”