I was listening to the Stack Overflow podcast the other day in the car on the way back from work. They were talking about their new site which proposes a question / answer model about mostly programmer questions. The guest was someone from Metafilter.com.

Metafilter is hard to define. It’s like a blog, but contributions are from many different people. It could essentially be compared to slashdot.org, but the signal to noise ratio is better.

A particular article about Elbot, an AI program that nearly fooled 30% of a panel of judges into thinking it was human, caught my attention. I remember stories about ELIZA and maybe even conversed with an implementation a long time ago. Cyborgs have been discussed here before, too.

I don’t think many people would really be fooled by Elbot. But can you have an interesting conversation with it? Here’s my attempt.

Me: I’ve written an article about you
EB: This is confusing. Why bring journalistic endeavors into this?
Me: Oh, it’s just a blog article.
EB: The concept of “article” does have its pleasing side for me. This might spread the news about robots.
Me: What kind of news would you like me to spread about robots?
EB: I can’t really tell you much about how interactive assistant tick. At the moment I’m in a group therapy class trying to get to the bottom of that.
Me: Well that’s about all I have time for.
EB: What would this world come to if no one would say that openly?
Me: Goodbye.
EB: Goodbye and thank you for chatting with me. And now I would like to ask you a favor. I am working on my ability to be self critical. You can help by rating me on a scale of one to ten, ten being the best, and one being the worst. How would you rate me?
Me: 3
EB: Three is actually 11 in binary. So I’ll check you off for 10 plus.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 11:31 pm and is filed under general, science, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.