[Megahal-general] MegaHAL accidentally passes Turing test

[John Goerzen]

Hi,

I thought I would share a recent MegaHAL experience with you.

I had, as an experiment, trained a MegaHAL based on a year's worth of
logs from irc.openprojects.net#haskell.  Using Joey Hess' hal.pl
script, I then put the MegaHAL on the channel as a bot.  I named it
MegaMonad (a monad is a function combinator feature of Haskell).

A couple of days ago, an interesting (and quite funny) exchange took
place.  One user, who had been on the channel off an on for awhile,
thought that the bot was a real person, and chalked up his inability
to understand much of what it said to his own inexperience in Haskell.

There are logs of that exchange here:

http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/MegaMonad_2fPassingTuringTest

There are also some other great quotes from MegaMonad here:

http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/MegaMonad

Some of them are funny mostly to Haskell programmers, but many are
quite good anyway.  Here are a couple of my favorites:

MegaHAL: To me java is a monomorphic type.

MegaHAL: haskell programming is kind of stimulant drug or something?

User:    are you evil?
MegaHAL: I seem to get into it if using jakarta collections

MegaHAL: Ah. C# is not that safe.

User:    is ssh turing complete?
MegaHAL: Shapr: you have little choice if that is complete enough 
         to be turing complete.

MegaHAL: Me going to use java for a lisp weenie.
User:    are you comparing Lisp weenies to Java weenies?
MegaHAL: To me java is a confusing network of stream data, 
         write out the weenies.

User:    Bush or Kerry?
MegaHAL: I'll re-port it and mention them on the grounds that emacs
         and xemacs are, but kerry has to get a vote for kerry.

And, FWIW, here is MegaHAL's instance in my top(1):

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 3646 jgoerzen  25   0  572m 571m 1516 S  0.0 64.5   0:30.39 megahal

I wonder if something can be done about that :-)

-- 
John Goerzen
Author, Foundations of Python Network Programming
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1590593715