Racter

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Racter is a computer program of artificial intelligence that produces random English prose.

Video Racter

Histori

Racter, short for raconteur , written by William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter. The existence of this program was revealed in 1983 in a book entitled The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed (ISBNÃ, 0-446-38051-2), which is described as composed entirely by the program. According to Chamberlain's introduction to the book, the program seems to run on a CP/M machine; it is written in "BASIC compiled on micro Z80 with 64K RAM." This version, a program that allegedly wrote the book, was not released to the general public. The sophistication claimed for the program is most likely exaggerated, as can be seen by the template system investigation of text creation.

However, in 1984 Mindscape, Inc. released an interactive version of Racter, developed by Inrac Corporation, for DOS, Amiga and Apple II computers. The published racter is similar to chatterbot. The BASIC program released by Mindscape is much more sophisticated than anything that can write sophisticated prose The Policeman's Beard. The commercial version of Racter can be likened to the computer version of Mad Libs, a game where you fill in the blank first and then put it into a text template to generate a surrealistic story. Commercial programs attempt to decipher text input, identify significant nouns and verbs, which will then bring back to make "conversations", insert user input into a phrase template which is then combined, together with modules that conjugate English verbs.

Instead, the text in The Policeman's Beard , in addition to edited from a large number of outputs, will be the product of Chamberlain's own templates and modules excluded from the commercial release of the program.

Maps Racter

Reception

PC Magazine describes some of Policeman's Beard span> ' scenes as "surprising for their straightforwardness" and "reflective". It concludes that the book is "weird and wise and sometimes fun". The Computer Game World describes Racter as "redirecting to another dimension that may be best viewed before paying the ticket price. (Try before you buy!)"

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See also

• David Cope
• ELIZA
• List of chatterbots
• MegaHAL

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References

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External links

• Racter in MobyGames
• The Half Built Police Beard (PDF HTML)
• The Racter download for MS-DOS-based computers, including original template files.
• Getting a Computer for Writing About Yourself by Bill Chamberlain
• Racter FAQ from August 1993 edition of The Journal of Computer Game Design

Source of the article : Wikipedia