dougie@its63b.UUCP (03/12/87)
I have had a fair response concerning my Ractor/eliza query. Here follows
a summary of the e-mail I received.
Thanks to all who replied.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "BARNETTE,JAMES RICHARD JR" <gt5951b%gitpyr%edu.gatech.gatech@net.cs.relay>
Message-Id: <8703051751.AA00500@gitpyr.gatech.edu>
Subject: Re: Eliza, Doctor, Parry, Ractor, etc, ...
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology
"The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed" is published by
Warner Brothers. When I bought it it was about eleven dollars.
The author of the book is Racter, a program which writes English
prose. The program itself is by William Chamberlain (he also wrote
the introduction.) There was an article a few years ago in Scientific
American describing Racter. It was in the regular feature "Computer
Recreations" by A.K. Dewdney. Sorry, but I don't remember more.
The book is really just a collection of various short writings:
short (two paragraph) essays, free verse poetry (which might be called
structured prose), and even two pages of (horribly bad) limericks.
There is also one short story, "Soft Ions", which was originally
published in Omni magazine. (Sorry, no idea of what issue). The book
is very interesting; I would recommend it if you want to see what kind
of prose computers can write.
Although Racter writes grammatically correct English, the meaning
of his (its?) writing is usually quite bizarre. For instance, in one
of the first short essays of the book, an essay on love, Racter asks
"...does steak love lettuce?". Racter is good enough that his writing
might be mistaken for a human's, but a psychiatrist would probably
diagnose him as very psychotic.
Richard Barnette
Georgia Tech P.O. Box 35951
Atlanta, GA 30332
USA
--
BARNETTE,JAMES RICHARD JR
Georgia Insitute of Technology, Atlanta Georgia, 30332
uucp: ...!{akgua,allegra,amd,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo,ut-ngp}!gatech!gitpyr!gt5951b
ARPA: gt5951b@pyr.ocs.gatech.edu
====================
From copp@bellcore.UUCP Mon Mar 9 16:43:10 GMT 1987
From: copp@bellcore.UUCP (David H. Copp)
Subject: Re: Eliza, Doctor, Parry, Ractor, etc, ...
Message-ID: <231@bellcore.UUCP>
Reply-To: copp@bellcore.UUCP (David H. Copp)
Organization: Bell Communications Research
Keywords: Eliza, Ractor, Parry, Doctor, software, literature.
"The Policeman's Beard is Half Contructed,"
authored by Racter (with a little help from
William Chamberlain), Warner Books Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10103, USA. First printing Oct 1984.
This is a new publisher. You may have to write directly to
Warner Books, P.O. Box 690, New York, NY 10019, USA.
$0.75 per order and $0.50 per copy.
This is not a technical book. It tells you very little about
Racter. It is an amusing addition to your coffee table.
Martin Gardner (or was it Hofstedder?) devoted two or
three pages to Racter about three years ago (Scientific American).
Good article. The program itself can be purchased, IBM PC format,
for about $75--see the SA article.)
--
David H. Copp
(201) 829-4337
bellcore!copp
=================
Subject: police mans beard is half constucted
The policemans beard is half constructed was written by Ractor. Its pres
ently being released on micros by Hayden i belive. Ive seen it for the mac and i
bm pc.
it an excelent program.
S.David Streiff
Univ of Hartford
W Hartford CT
BitNet: STREIFF@HARTFORD.BITNET
====================
From: Robert Farrell <farrell-robert@arpa.yale>
Subject: Eliza
I have a small but interesting Eliza that I wrote in T (a dialect of Scheme). I
could put it in the public domain if you want it. It emulates a car mechanic and
is a lot of fun. It would be easy to add more rules or convert it to another lisp,
since it is written clearly and is pretty well documented. Why do you want an
Eliza - just for fun or for something you are doing (e.g. teaching pattern-matching)?
I have included a transcript and a few notes about the program below. Just send
me a note and I will give you the whole program ... it is only about 700 lines long.
If you don't have some sort of LISP to convert it to, or don't want to do any work
converting the program, then this isn't the Eliza for you.
E E
D D --> "Rob calling"
C C
G--G
Farrell@YALE.ARPA *** decvax!yale!Farrell.UUCP *** BITNET: Farrell@yalecs.BITNET
====================
From: Chris Price <cjp@uk.ac.aber.cs>
Subject: Re: Eliza...
Eliza should be easily available at Edinburgh.
I can think of two places where it is free:
1) In Poplog as a library, you do pop11 -eliza
2) In GNU emacs - a free version of emacs widely distributed.
Cheers,
Chris Price.
=======================
From: Mike Urban <uucp@uucp.sdcrdcf>
Organization: TRW Inc., Redondo Beach, CA
In article <310@its63b.ed.ac.uk> you write:
>
>I have heard about the various "chatty" programs which have been written
>to imitate Psychiatrists (sp?), Doctors, Scribe's, etc, but have never
>had the opportunity to play (play?!) use any of these programs. This kind
>of software interests me a lot and would like to know if any of them
>(or similar type) are freely available.
>
>There is a book, I believe, titled "The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed"
>which chronicles the 'works' of one of these programs (I can't remember which).
I have ported a version of "DOCTOR" (a.k.a. Eliza) to run with David Betz's
Xlisp 1.6. Xlisp is a public-domain version of LISP and has been posted
to the net in its Unix incarnation. My version includes an Esperanto
translation of DOCTOR's "script", intended to provide language practice.
"The Policeman's Beard" is based on Racter. I don't know about its
availability.
--
Dougie Nisbet
University of Edinburgh | <UUCP> ...seismo!mcvax!ukc!its63b!dougie
Medical Statistics Unit | <JANET> dougie@uk.ac.ed.its63b
Medical School
Teviot Place
Edinburgh
Scotland