Re: Looking for an old A2 program

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

In article <aqy4a.3075$hQ2.1945@newssvr16.news.prodigy.com>, "Phil Abel"
<phil_nospam_abel@prodigy.nospam.net> writes:

>There was an online game for the Apple II GBBS/ACOS BBS system called "Ask
>Dr. Shem" which was a fair copy of Eliza.  Written by the same guy who wrote
>a lot of interesting text adventures for the same BBS platform.  Yes all it
>does is little more than say "Tell me more about ";input$.  A nice thing
>about ACOS is you can keep adding on module after module that looks for
>keywords, etc. in the user input and customizes responses.  So basically you
>can do some instr$() searches for some detailed responses, and otherwise
>just through out a canned "Tell me more" response if it can't find anything.
>I think it even had a typing speed mod so that it would look like somebody
>on the other side was typing in real time (put in random nulls between
>characters) a la BBS chat.  You could probably even modify it to randomly
>put in typos and correct them to further sell the illusion.

In fact, it often seems like "technical support" is nothing more than
a 300-line BASIC program.  ;-)

>I guess it would be interesting to set it up as a fake "chat with sysop"
>session and see how many people fall for it.  I have read about some people
>having a lot of fun making 'bots using some more advanced AI, but still
>Eliza-type logic, and plugging them into chat rooms...  Esp those bots that
>appear to be flirty females that get hit on all the time by the chat room
>denizens...  You could probably pass an AOL-ized version of the "turing
>test" with something like that :)

As I think about this, it seems to be not so much a case of computer
capabilities rising to the level that Turing envisioned, but human
communication dropping to levels that would have appalled him.  ;-)

Computers aren't becoming more human--humans are becoming
more mechanical.  ;-(

-michael

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