March 18, 1999

An Odyssey: From Book Fiction to Internet Chatter

ere are some milestones in the quest for digital creatures with wit:

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1921 : A Czech dramatist, Karel Capek, coins the word robot (from the Czech word for worker) for mechanical servants in his play "R.U.R." (Rossum's Universal Robots).

1950 : In a paper titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Joseph Turing describes the Imitation Game, now known as the Turing test, used to determine a computer's "intelligence" by its ability to simulate human conversation.

1956 : The field of artificial intelligence is named at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project, attended by pioneers in the field like Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy.

1959 : Drs. Minsky and McCarthy establish the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

1966 : At M.I.T., Joseph Weizenbaum creates the first conversational computer program, Eliza, which imitates a psychotherapist.

1968 : Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick introduce HAL 9000 in the film "2001: A Space Odyssey."

1971 : A former Weizenbaum colleague, Kenneth Colby, introduces Perry, a chatterbot that simulates a paranoid-schizophrenic.

1989 : Michael Mauldin's Julia chatterbot appears on the Tiny MUD, a chat space on the Internet.

1991 : The first annual Loebner Prize competition is established for chatterbots to compete in a Turing test. PC Therapist, an updated version of Eliza, places first.

1995 : Richard Wallace designs Alice, a chatterbot originally used as an interface to control a Webcam.

1995 : Robby Garner's first Internet chatterbot, Agent Max Headcold, makes its debut on the Fringeware Web site, in one of the first commercial bot applications.

1998 : Neuromedia introduces Neurostudio, a commercial chatterbot software program.

1998 : Virtual Personalities begins selling $14.95 Verbots, chatterbots with computer-animated faces.