I took a long sojourn into the history of interactive fiction (IF) with my launching pad being the stunning revelations unearthed by Andy Balo over at waxy in regards to the never-completed Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure sequel. But after reading that, and poking around the archives and playing a few great examples of IF, I started wondering why more hasn’t been done to advance the interface of these games? Why not incoporate more AI? Read more…

Well, George and his programmer, Rollo Carpenter, won the prize. This is a bit of an upset for those who follow the competition; Alice, a fairly well-known chatbot created by Dr. Richard Wallace has grabbed the top prize in the contest for the last three years running. However, no bot yet has won the gold medal for convincing a judge that it is a human. While ALICE is based on the popular AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), the Jabberwacky language appears to be proprietary technology.

[Blatant personal plug: I have my own version of an AIML bot running on AIM. He's based on the popular cartoon character Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. You can talk to him at his AIM address: mast3rshak3bot. WARNING: The character in the cartoon is hardly polite. Niether is the bot.]

It’s all about bots this week for me! My mind had already been going down this track for a month or so when low and behold Wired runs an article in the magazine about SmarterChild — a bot I’ve been playing with quite a bit. While investigating the matter I also stumbled across this article Wired published back in September about bots that can be used to prank people. Of course I did that right away and pranked my good friend Mike. Unfortunately, he’s been listening to me rant about these bots for a while now and he wasn’t biting when the bot knocked at the door. But the rest of you watch out! And, of course, my investigation wouldn’t be through if I didn’t have a bot of my own. Read more…