Category Archives: Humor

Oops, we passed the Turing Test

Humor, Online Life

I was bored last month. I decided that it would be fun to hack up an AI bot to sit on the #haskell IRC channel.

I wanted this bot to be a conversation bot, so I would need some sort of AI engine. I wanted it to be a learning bot, so it could learn from what people have said before. I searched around, and it seems there aren’t many good learning AI engines out there for Linux. I eventually settled on MegaHAL.

I then obtained the logs for the conversation in over the past year, and used it to train the bot.

The result was sometimes hilarous, and often riddled with typos and nonsensical (considering the source, many would say that would be expected).

I started a page of MegaMonad quotes with some of the funnier exchanges.

But here’s the best part: there was a person on the channel that didn’t realize that MegaMonad was a bot! Perhaps we just passed the Turing Test accidentally…

Favorite Debate Quotes

Humor, Politics

“I hear there’s rumors on the Internets.”

“I’ve got a plan to increase the wetlands by 3 million.” Which wetlands? Three million what? Acres? Square miles? Dollars? Gallons?

“I proposed the hydrogen-generated automobile.” Wow. So he has a technology to grow an automobile from hydrogen now? (Usually we power automobiles, not generate them.)

Beaten Hardware

Hardware, Humor

There’s a funny discussion over at Slashdot where people relate tales of hardware that has survived a beating. My favorite quote:

The original VT-100 was top-rack dishwasher safe. No, really – that was the standard DEC repair instructions in case someone spilled something into a keyboard. Place the keyboard key-side down on the top rack of a dishwasher, normal wash cycle, air dry.