The New York Times has an interesting profile of Richard Wallace, a frustrated former academic whose artificial intellicence creation, "Alice," has twice won the Loebner Prize for the most life-like simulation of human conversation.

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Approximating Life



Here's a sample:

Wallace... began theorizing that only a few thousand statements composed the bulk of all conversation -- the everyday, commonplace chitchat that humans engage in at work, at the water cooler and in online discussion groups. Alice was his proof. If he taught Alice a new response every time he saw it baffled by a question, he would eventually cover all the common utterances and even many unusual ones. Wallace figured the magic number was about 40,000 responses. Once Alice had that many preprogrammed statements, it -- or ''she,'' as he'd begun to call the program fondly -- would be able to respond to 95 percent of what people were saying to her.