I A Learn(ing)
Sunday, October 3rd, 2004
I Am Learn is an experiment in a script that generates weblog entries and uses sources out on the web as seeds to generate the text. It is one of the most interesting projects I’ve come across in a while.
Peter Cooper, aka: boog wrote the perl program that makes it work.
“I wrote a ridiculous Perl program to generate text. Thing is, it developed some bugs, and has managed to create phrases and combinations of words (which actually make sense) that I didn’t even program in. I hooked it up to the Blogger API, and now it updates its own weblog with no editing on my part (I just give it a bunch of topics to talk about). Check it out, I’ve called it ‘Learn’. I can’t stop laughing when I read it.. it’s so realistic for a weblog. It sounds like a typical teenage girl.”
This reminds me of the Joseph Weizenbaum program called Eliza which took the form of a psychiatrist. I love these natural language parsing engines, fascinating to watch and think about relative to the Turing test.
