Chatbots ...
jacquesm: I've written a couple and I had great fun with them.One of the best attempts was a really nasty little trick, basically a human-backed chatbot. The way it worked was like this:You get an icq (at the time) client and proxy it through the bot, the bot goes and makes random friends.When someone reponds to the bots 'opening' line (Hi how are you?) you get back a response. You now answer with two things at once, the first a regexp that matches the response and puts in wildcards for linguistic fluff, and the actual answer.The bot stores both in its database, and passes the answer to the user. Who then replies.Meanwhile the bot continues to find new 'victims', and everytime it gets back an answer it tries to make a match based on it's canned responses. It knows where in the conversation it is (context), so a response will only be matched in the right spot in a conversation.After being the bots 'backend' for a couple of days it could keep up a conversation for a good 20 minutes from the 'hi how are you' until it would run out of steam, by using wildcards in a smart way it is amazing how 'relevant' an answer can be even though the match is only on one or two words.It was some of the most fun I ever had with computers, not because it 'fooled' the users, simply because of seeing all these patterns in language.