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From: jasona@sugar.hackercorp.com (Jason Asbahr)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Eliza-like Fun
Keywords: Fun, natural fun
Message-ID: <7631@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Date: 28 Jan 91 00:02:43 GMT
Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston
Lines: 30


Greets!
 
One night recently (having nothing better to do), I whipped up a simple 
term program to amaze and amuse my friends.  It would simply pass 
characters between the console (Atari ST) and the modem...but with a 
little twist.  Words (read as: strings bracketed by spaces) are taken
from both modem and keyboard input and stored in an array (10,000).
There was a random 1 in 10 chance that at every space typed by the
friend at the other end of the modem connection, a word would be selected
(also randomly) from the stored array and injected into the middle of
his/her typing stream.  :)  The results were often quite funny, depending
on the content of the conversation, etc.  
 
I find that the "game" would be a lot more fun if some kind of proper
grammatical analysis was employed.  I've thought about it a little, 
looking from something simple and fast...maybe referencing the "captured"
words to a built in dictionary to assign noun/verb/adverb status and
then only injecting words according to the previously typed word...so 
that verbs wouldn't be placed immediately after verbs ("ate ran")...
 
Can anyone point me in the right direction?  I would also like to hear
from someone who has played with similar toys.  I'm not sure that this
has any practical purpose...but it might!
 
         -Jason Asbahr 
          jasona@sugar.hackercorp.com
"But truth is so great a thing that we must not disdain any medium that
will lead us to it."  - Montaigne
--