I am half crazy

A very cool exhibit at the Exploratorium is Talk with Daisy: it’s a computer program designed to respond to your sentences in a way that is as human-like as possible. Daisy is… how to say this without hurting her feelings… let’s just say that you are more likely to get a deeply meaningful conversation with Mr. Fish than you are with Daisy. But it’s fun and interesting to try to talk to her, and make her say stuff. Dawn at some point managed to teach her to say “hella”. That was good.

But there are some more advanced “chatterbots” out there, trying to pass that elusive Turing test. Two of the best, apparently, are ALICE and Jabberwacky. Discover magazine had the genius idea of pitting them against each other, and see what would happen. A surprisingly existential conversation…