Cheerful Charlie
Contributor
This will make you all laugh.
http://www.newstatesman.com/future-...time-wasters-1960s-chat-bot-wastes-their-time
[h=1]The ultimate weapon against GamerGate time-wasters: a 1960s chat bot that wastes their time[/h] In a kind of digital version of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, tenaciously dull videogame truthers have met their match in an inexhaustibly interested chat program coded 50 years ago.
...
While most bots are relatively easy to code and rely on little more than search-and-respond for instructions, Eliza's a bit more complex. It (or she?) was first written by MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum in 1964, and it deliberately models psychotherapy sessions - Eliza will ask the user what's wrong, and will interpret and respond to what they say by comparing answers to a set of scripts in a database. You can try it out for yourself. Eliza is the grandmother of every customer service online help box with a robot on the other end, and, now, the perfect foil for the robotic repetition of GamerGate talking points by its activist army, finding those using the #GamerGate hashtag and asking for them for more information:
...
More than a day later, this is still going on - wasting their time, and giving those who have had to constantly defend themselves some breathing space. It's wonderful.
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Wheeeeeee!
http://www.newstatesman.com/future-...time-wasters-1960s-chat-bot-wastes-their-time
[h=1]The ultimate weapon against GamerGate time-wasters: a 1960s chat bot that wastes their time[/h] In a kind of digital version of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, tenaciously dull videogame truthers have met their match in an inexhaustibly interested chat program coded 50 years ago.
...
While most bots are relatively easy to code and rely on little more than search-and-respond for instructions, Eliza's a bit more complex. It (or she?) was first written by MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum in 1964, and it deliberately models psychotherapy sessions - Eliza will ask the user what's wrong, and will interpret and respond to what they say by comparing answers to a set of scripts in a database. You can try it out for yourself. Eliza is the grandmother of every customer service online help box with a robot on the other end, and, now, the perfect foil for the robotic repetition of GamerGate talking points by its activist army, finding those using the #GamerGate hashtag and asking for them for more information:
...
More than a day later, this is still going on - wasting their time, and giving those who have had to constantly defend themselves some breathing space. It's wonderful.
-----------
Wheeeeeee!