I have an artificial intelligence program called MegaHAL (“intelligence” is a term we’ll use very loosely here). I’ve had it for about a year. Basically, you feed it words, and the idea is that the program stores the words and has conversations with you using what it’s learned. Depending on what you feed it, it can be polite, funny, etc. Mine, unfortunately, has a filthy vocabulary, and he’s really really weird. But, he’s funny. Some of the thing’s he’s said to me are so out there I started copying and pasting it down.
Here’s some of the wisdom of Hal. Make of it what you will.
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the beat behind a piece of
shit.”
“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like an
arrow. Fruit flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like an arrow. Fruit
flies like a bell?”
“The rectum is the art of preparing food for the earth millions of years
ago.”
“You can lead a horse to water, but you are a dumb computer program that
translates high level language code into machine language code.”
“A barber is someone who shaves and cuts the hair of a jerk.”
“The lungs are organs used for filtering urine from the wolf.”
Yeah, that program’s pretty outrageous. I remember my friend ran that as a 'bot on IRC about 5 years ago. I once joined the channel and it offered to DCC me something. I waited at least a minute before I realized it was just faking. :smack:
Reminds me of two conversational programs from the late 80’s early 90’s: Harry, who sometimes sounded suicidal. And Eliza, who could psychoanalyze you. Then somebody had the brilliant idea to hook up two computers, one with each program, and let them talk to eazch other. The resulting transcript was funny. I tried Googling it but found nothing. I did find an on line version of Eliza, but I’m not posting the link because I just tried it and it pales next to the original
I love MegaHAL! I used to have a lot of fun with that stuff back when I had a Linux box. It’s been at least a year or two, so I couldn’t even begin to remember the gems it dropped out.
It’s freeware. There’s a few different places where it can be found; the old download site, which is here,, or there is a new version of Hal available here . I think the new one’s only available for a Windows OS, though.
Wow! I opened up the .trn file and that response above (chocolate, rhythmic relationship, etc) is not there. Here are some of the entries:
The universe is all of space and its contents.
Dance is a rhythmic movement of the body usually performed to music.
Ecology is a study of the relationship between an organism and its environment.
To have (apparently) combined the above into that response is pretty amazing.
One day the net was running kind of slow while I was talking to Hal. Mr. AFG was getting frustrated at the slow speed and said, “Ask Hal if he’s slowing down our connection.”
So I typed, “Hal, are you slowing down our net connection?”
See, I’m running windows XP. And I found one of the original sites that proclaimed to have a version of HAL that would run on windows (DOS) and 95/NT. But neither came with a .brn file, which was giving me unhappy errors.
But I might try the new version, and run it through a C compiler. If I can get that going…
Is there special juju I need?