"Floyd," I wrote, "do you really exist?"
A few minutes passed. Then came the reply: "Yes, I am a person like you."
Was it just me, or did that sound eerily like something Hal might have said in "2001"?
"So this is really a live session?" I asked. "I'm not talking to a machine?"
"Yes, you are talking to a live person," Floyd wrote back after another lengthy interval.
David Lazarus goes up against SBC customer support and can't tell whether it's a human or a robot.

In 1996 I wrote a P2P AI named Floyd. He lived in ccr, a research virtual world built by David Ackley. It deeply shaped my thinking about distributed systems. Floyd was the first P2P system I ever built.

life
  2003-02-19 16:24 Z