MegaHAL
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
MegaHAL is a software program that is commonly known as a Chatterbot or a conversation simulator.
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[edit] Background
MegaHAL was created by Jason Hutchens and made its first debut in the 1998 Loebner Prize Contest. Like many chatterbots, the intent is for MegaHAL to appear as a human, fluent in your native language. As a user types its conversations into MegaHAL, it will respond with sentences that are sometimes coherent and other times complete gibberish. MegaHAL learns as a conversation progresses. It will remember new words, sentence structures a user's train of thought. It will even learn new ways to substitute words or phrases for other words or phrases. Many would consider conversation simulators like MegaHAL to be a primitive form of Artificial intelligence. However, MegaHAL doesn't know or understand the conversation or even the sentence structure. It is simply generating its conversation based on sequential and mathematical relationships.
In the world of conversation simulators, MegaHAL is based on relatively old technology and could be considered very primitive. But its popularity has grown due to its humorous nature. Due to the way MegaHAL works, it has been known to respond with twisted and nonsensical statements that many find to be very humorous.
In 1996, Jason Hutchens entered the Loebner Prize Contest with HeX, a chatterbot based on ELIZA. HeX won the competition that year and took the $2000 prize for having the highest overall score. In 1998, Hutchens again entered the Loebner Prize Contest with his new program, MegaHAL.
[edit] Distribution
MegaHAL is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Its source code can be downloaded from the Sourceforge project page. Older versions and precompiled version can be downloaded from the Official Site download page.
