Let Your Fingers Do The Talking

primary function is to be a non-person like a telemarketer following a sales script...What if the AI character had its own story to tell, its own interests and hang ups - just like real people do? What if the AI had an agenda of its own? "

So Fahey here was butting heads--as all good AI programmers do in the end--with the Turing Test. An philosophical quandry brought up in 1950 by the codecracking scientist Alan Turing, the Turing Test is a contest between human and machine. A user is connected via keyboard to an artificial intelligence entity and a human being, conversing with both of them. If the user can't tell the difference between them, the test has been passed--by the machine. A nice summary of Turing's revolutionary thought can be found at http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Turing.html .

Fahey is uniquely qualified to tackle the Turing Test's issues. An active member of the ALICE and AIML Architecture Committee (a body exploring ways to promote and make available AIML--Artificial Intelligence Mark-up Language--and the Alicebot, an AI similar in tone to Fahey's ada1852), he has explored these issues before, most notably in his chatbot Maximillian (http://www.askrom.com/www/askrom/02-max/index.html ). Both Maximillian and ada1852 use a Flash skin to access AIML modules.

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