"Eventually, she changed her message to something more
conventional, probably under threat of severe beatings from her
friends and family. But before she changed it, she got to where she
wouldn't even bother answering the phone if she was available; it
was a lot of fun listening to people talk to a machine, thinking
they were talking to a person.
"I can relate. Ever since High School, I've wanted to write
programs that acted like, or looked like real people. I remember
playing with a program called Eliza when I was young and thinking
how amazing it was that it worked as well as it id. The Eliza
program would impersonate a Psychiatrist and attempt to "analyze"
your "problem" by holding a natural language conversation with you.
However, as soon as you realized that it was just matching simple
patterns, it would mention something that you had said earlier,
just to throw you for a loop. It was primitive, but effective."
