Re: Looking for an old A2 program

["Phil Abel" <phil_nospam_abel@prodigy.nospam.net>]

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.

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 :)

"Val Golding" <notval@blarg.net> wrote in message
gie15v8kcl12ulbn7qmvi3laek3bis3q48@4ax.com">news:gie15v8kcl12ulbn7qmvi3laek3bis3q48@4ax.com...
> "Eliza" came long before the Mac was a gleam in Woz's eye. I had a
> copy of Eliza in early 1978.
>
>
> On 19 May 2002 08:23:40 GMT, mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon) wrote:
>
> >Terry & Utahna Olsen wrote:
> >
> >>Remember that old "Artificial intelligence" program that you could
"chat"
> >>with?  It was supposed to be a bratty little girl.  I think it was
written
> >>in Integer or Applesoft.  Anyway, what was it's name and can it be
> >>downloaded anywhere?
> >
> >If you mean "Eliza", it wasn't a bratty little girl, it was a Rogerian
> >therapist in style.  Basically, it reflecting what you said back to
> >you in a surprisingly natural way by performing simple linguistic
> >analysis of the input and transforming it to produce the output.
> >(Except occasionally, when the program detected that things
> >were getting stuck--when it would ask about something off the wall.)
> >
> >It began life as an academic exercise, written by Joseph Wiezenbaum
> >at MIT on the MAC time-sharing system as a kind of demo.  It was
> >named after Eliza Doolittle, who was taught "how to speak" in Shaw's
> >Pygmalion (the source of My Fair Lady).
> >
> >There's a nice article on it by Weizenbaum at:
> >
> >http://i5.nyu.edu/~mm64/x52.9265/january1966.html
> >
> >Many other implementations followed the lead of the original,
> >and some were written in BASIC.
> >
> >-michael
> >
> > Email:  mjmahon@aol.com
> > Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
>
>