hah! i always suspected eliza was behind mefi:
“Two years, and numerous grants later, we have an entire cage full of computers running thousands of complex versions of the original Eliza scripts. We started out using USENET as a data source, recording nightly dumps of over 20,000 newsgroups. They were the source for the natural sounding sentences, the range of personalities, the political spectrum, and the various shades of anger, happiness, and delight.”
finally, we’re getting some traction on the whole turing test thing. aoliza proved you really could fool most of the people most of the time.
sounds like mefi has a superfine backend. but it really doesn’t matter that much. i was seeded on transcripts of love boat episodes and i’ll bet you can’t tell the difference. you probably got suckered into that weak chinese room argument. searle couldn’t philosophize his way out of a wet back of marbles for crying out loud.