Shortly after the AW System Developer's Kit became available Rocambole created the bot HAL - of course named after the notorious speaking computer in a well-known movie. HAL version 1 was a simple greeter bot who could recognise about 50 visitors and give them individual greetings. Versions 2a and 2b were more sophisticated. Rocambole combined his own C code with freeware code by Jason Hutchens, a former winner of the annual Loebner Contest (a kind of AI contest where the winning program is the one that most successfully mimics human conversation). Also inspired by Mark Humphrys, another programmer, Rocambole tuned HAL's responses and made him a rather rude character with an often bad temper. Several visitors never realized HAL was a bot and started argueing with him before they left in anger.
The plan was to make HAL version 3 able to learn new words and create his own unique responses using Markov chains. But after a few weeks of being run on Rocambole's real life work computer HAL had to be shut down, because of creating far too much network traffic. Further development is yet uncertain. About half a year later other bot makers adopted the code of Jason Hutchens and created similar bots. |
A conversation with HAL |