I chat a lot. I practically grew up online; socializing with as many people in cyberspace as in real-life, actually perhaps even more. The former were/are always, always, always more interesting than real-life people, and they usually stay that way until you meet them or hear them talk. Unless they’re absolutely attractive yet impossible to attain, they cease to be interesting. The mind sure works in mysterious ways.

So to me, the idea of having a good conversation is very much related to a messenger of some sort. It started with IRC, then evolved into MSN and briefly Yahoo! Messenger, and later GTalk. That’s not to mention my enduring SMSophilia and the fortunes I spent over the years on witty, neat, short text messages.

As such, I seek good conversation all the time. This brings us to the point of this thus-far pointless post: the idea of having two robots chat together is so very intriguing. I just found out about it by chance while googling for something completely different.

I Chat, Therefore I Am

Can a smooth-talking robot initiate good conversation, generate witty responses, and reveal profound thoughts? See what happens when two chatbots speak to each other.

Most chatbots rely on fairly simple tricks to appear lifelike. Richard Wallace, creator of the top-ranked chatbot ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), has handwritten a database of thousands of possible conversational gambits. Type a comment to ALICE, and it checks the phrase and its key words for a response coded to those words. In contrast, Jabberwacky, another top-rated Internet bot produced by Rollo Carpenter, keeps track of everything people have said to it, and tries to reuse those statements by matching them to the writer’s input. Neither chatbot has long-term memory, so they respond only to the last sentence written.

Here’s the exciting part, read this log of a chat session between ALICE and Jabberwacky:

A: Do you experience love?

J: No. I’m 53 years old.

A: Can you explain how it feels to be 53 years old?

J: How old are you?

A: I am 9 years old.

J: Nine? I don’t believe you : ).

A: : -) I don’t have any reason to deceive you.

J: Yes, you do, you’re a woman.

Haha. Now that’s slightly sexist, but it’s so funny! Judging by this log and others posted in the article linked above, ALICE and Jabberwacky sure chat better than 90% of all the people I have met online in my adult life, and they were many. Nay, make that 95%; good conversation is a rare commodity my friends.

This must be the strangest building I have seen in Jordan. It is so thin from one side (only fits one room on that side) and then it grows to support two or three rooms on the other side. It is close to the University of Jordan, near the ex-circle of Al Manhal. I guess this is what happens when you want to milk the piece of land you own, and economize on building materials.

We will be annihilated. The earth will be sucked up by a black hole created by humans. We can’t stop them. We will become ’strange matter.’ All our civilization, our collective memories, our religions and magic, our literature and arts, our ancestors and future generations, our years of evolution, all will shrink or expand to semi-nothingness.

In layman’s terms: a European accelerator called the Large Hardon Collider houses protons that will smash against each other this summer. The experiment is supposed to recreate energies and conditions generated only after the Big Bang. $8 billion dollars, 14 years, tens of scientists built this monster. If things go wrong, the circumstances mentioned in the previous paragraph will translate into reality. Only we won’t be around to recognize that. (Source)

Dude, that shit is not funny. It’s not philosophical, it’s not religious, it’s not existential, it’s masochistic but in a very scientific way. I don’t want to caricaturize it because I don’t find it remotely appealing, even though I am a grump, a brooder, a pessimist, and a talented morbid with some other twisted traits.

It is nobody’s right to conduct such experiments that could wipe out the whole of humanity and possibly the universe and any other worlds in it. I demand that governments do something about this! These mad European scientists are up to no good. I do not want to die yet, many more wars and plagues and famines to witness. At least there is some negotiable dignity in those, some solace that they might not be entirely our doing or that we did not know better. But to be erased by a bunch of European physicists who already know that there is a chance things could go wrong? That I do not tolerate.

It is not funny. It is not prophetic or progressive. It’s suicidal, and I don’t care if you like science. Do your experiments on the moon if you’re so smart. Meanwhile, I will go live in a cave now and pray the black hole will not eat me up.

A Polish man in the UK was caught in a compromising situation with a vacuum cleaner:

A Polish worker has come up with an unusual excuse after being caught in the act with a vacuum cleaner.

The building contractor claimed he was cleaning his underpants with Henry Hoover when he was found naked and on his knees in a hospital’s staff canteen.

A stunned security guard stumbled onto the man in the middle of a compromising act with the cleaner, which has a large smiley face painted on its front and a hose protruding from its “nose”.

The security guard, suitably horrified, told the man to “clean himself and the hoover” before asking him to leave and informing his bosses.

When later questioned by his employers, the man said he was vacuuming his underpants, which was “a common practice in Poland”. He has since been fired.

The funniest bit? The ad for the Henry Hoover says it is a “powerful, reliable vacuum cleaner ready to go time and time again.” Time and time again indeed!

Vacuum cleaning will never be the same again.