Archive for November, 2005



The Legal Machines Project is trying to create artificial intelligence agents to aid the legal profession. This recently garnered media attention when a law firm announced it would be using such an agent to provide legal resources online next year.
Digital text aficionados may be familiar with the past work of project member Selmer Bringsjord, director […]

All great debates should be settled after electronic art presentations, and it doesn’t hurt if that presentation is by Jason Nelson. (See the talk online).What was spawned below, arose from the primordial soup, though not the tastey minestrone served at Paliminos.

At the legendary ELO-after reading hangout, Paliminos, at a table which included Australia-based Web artist Jason Nelson, Kate Hayles, Nick Gesslar, David Sgeoard, we raisied the question that currently divides this country through electronic literature: Evolution vs. Intelligent Design.

The mechanical Turk (discussed here earlier) was an 18th-century chess-playing automaton - although behind the clockwork was actually a man hiding in a box. The public was fascinated by an automated approach to a mechanistic but incredibly complex problem (the rules of chess). While a hoax, the Turk was an effective one in that it […]

For those of you who haven’t typed your favorite topic words and phrases into Google Print, I highly recommend it. Some search terms I tried included:

interactive fiction
hypertext fiction
eliterature
electronic literature
chatbot

Some results are, of course, better than others. “Electronic literature” is a bit hit-and-miss compared to eliterature, and “chatbot” results are quite thin. Still, when looking at […]

Toby and Chatbot Marketing

Toby is a commercial chatbot for YOMA (Your Online Marketing Agency) which both promotes the company and resells the idea of itself as an effective method of online marketing.
Toby’s interface is built on Oddcast’s ubiquitous SitePal technology, the same system used by Pandorabots. However the interesting thing about Toby is not the interface but the […]