If you’re interested in AI, you’ll be surprised how far they’ve come along till now. You can try them yourself with online chat bots. Don’t be too hard on them though – they’re good. But not that good. My favorite place to find online chat bots is http://testing.turinghub.com/. It features some of the best bots out there. I have a personal liking for Landru – the namesake from the “Star Trek” episode – Return of the Archons.

You’ll find that each chat bot has it’s own personality. For example, the one called Alice is well – bitchy almost! You’ll need to experiment with them to find out which one is your style. Just ensure you keep the conversation linear. If you talk about something and then come back to it later, the bots don’t seem to remember it and therefore reveal themselves as not human. But otherwise, they amaze you with their understanding of what you’re talking about.

In fact, in the aforementioned site, it asks if you think you were chatting with the computer or one of the site’s adminsitrators – something called the “Turing Test”. Turring suggested that the proof of real AI would be when a human was unable to identify whether he was talking to a robot or not. In recent test, chat bots were able to fool humans 30% of the time. That’s pretty good. Stay tuned. They’re getting better. And when they do, we’ll be right here to tell you abou tit.