--- In sfrsa@yahoogroups.com, David Calkins <dcalkins@s...> wrote:
> http://www.subservientchicken.com/
<http://www.subservientchicken.com/>
>
> It will lay an egg!
> Do the Macarena!
> Build a pillow fort!
> Do jumping jacks!
> Get funky!
>
> Use your creativity!

That's a pretty cool website, but here's one that is even more
astounding from an AI perspective:

http://www.jabberwacky.com

This is a "Chatterbot" which is a program that tries to carry on
human-like conversation with the user. Sometimes it is bizzarre or
disconnected, but often it is so human in it's responses you won't
beleive it. The really cool thing is that it learned everything it
knows just by conversing with real humans -- it stores human-supplied
responses and correlates them to the prompts it supplied, and then
uses these correletions in reverse to respond when humans provide the
prompting. I'm sure it does a bit more than that, but that seems to
be essentially how it works. It does it so well that many users
become convinced that it is just cross-connecting them with other
users who are online at the same time, but I've managed to prove to
myself that it is storing the past conversations and regurgitating
them at later times.

Somebody could make a really cool robot by embedding this in a mobile
platform and making the interface work by using a wireless microphone
and speech-recognition/speech-synthesis software instead of a
keyboard interface! I may just try it myself...

Anyway, check it out -- but make sure you have lots of free time for
the next few days, I think you'll find yourself coming back to it
over and over like I have.