Humans expect what they see to be true. When using a computer to chat to "someone" else, particularly if they've never met the person, they are very willing to tell a lot about themself. usually the conversations can be very long and tiresome,
The computer patiently sits and "listens" to the entire conversation. When certain keywords come up, it will respond with some catchy remarks. If the list of keywords and responses are thorough, the computer should be able to fool the user in thinking they're talking to a real machine.
That's correct. This project is not about creating Artificial Intelligence as such, nor is it about creating thinking machines, it's about fooling the user in thinking they are talking to a real person. Computers can't have emotion or personality, but they sure can simulate it, and that's where this project comes in.
In some cases, the user is not fooled in thinking they're talking to a real person. In some cases, they want to talk to a computer, and try and have a conversation with it.
The system has been developed to run in Perl. Most Unix and Linux platforms have perl installed. If you're from a Windows platform, you can download ActiveState Perl and still use all the scripts on this site. I'm busy investigating a compiler for perl scripts, that will allow you to run the code without the need for ActiveState perl.