on "artificial" intelligence

Yesterday my friend d sent me an xkcd comic. It gave me an idea for an iPhone app. I asked my brothers if the app would be feasible to create:

Bob wrote:
What you've developed could easily be implemented with a Bayesian tree. Some guy wrote a chess-playing email spam filter using this - the spam filter would reap through already played games looking for similar moves, pick the next move from a game that won, and reply with that move (in the form of a 'rejected email' notification) http://dbacl.sourceforge.net/spam_chess-1.html

I'm a fan of simply scrambling the orig message into anagrams (joe into EOJ) then truncating everything to 3 or 4 letters then injecting random punctuation.  The sender will spend hours trying to figure out what the abbreviations mean.  I get charged per text message (up to 130 chars), and I hate it when people send 'OMG, LOL! BOS @ CATS?'

(*nux users, check 'man strfry' and 'man atoi', other OS users will have to google it (be cautious, I once typed 'man find' into google at work and was a bit shocked at the results....))

Steve wrote:
All you need is a vacuum that watches twitter and Facebook conversations.  Then matches against what the human says with the typical response on one or both of the real conversations.  Maybe do some better filtering of the existing data. Shouldn't be too hard.  Also sounds like something IBM would do... 

Delusional people have existed throughout history, I don't know how much commercial appeal there is to codifying unproductive conversations. Before going too far, you may consider watching: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0805564/

 Then d, who has a flair for the dramatic, and who can twist even the most mundane musings into a PhD thesis, wrote:

Packaging and marketing is always the tricky part, but I think the appeal of codified unproductive conversations is a fundamental part of our idea of what it is to be intelligent, and in fact human. Look at the history of the idea of robotics - at every stage of concept and development, the first thing their creators want to do is carry on an idiot conversation with their creations.

1. God creates man, attempts to have a conversation with his creation. Fails, and is forced to behavioral methods to get his messages across.
2. Türing posits a 'sufficient' test for humanity dependent only on discernable idiocy of conversation, commits suicide.
3. The first thing (after mortgage calculations) that programmers do with BASIC is create ELIZA, a therapist emulator that works exactly like the Twitter/Facebook vacuum cleaner you imagine. It generates better results in patients, on average, than actual flesh and blood therapists.
4. Phillip K. Dick thinks (and writes repeatedly) that it is impossible to differentiate human from robot lovers in anything but a negative sense, commits suicide.
4b. Women argue that it is very possible to differentiate human from robot lovers, and choose vibrators and television.
5. Ridley Scott makes a paranoid movie proving that robots are better actors than humans, many tech-oriented corporations suffer huge losses or go out of business (see "Blade Runner curse").
6. Cell phone companies boost their business exponentially by offering "unlimited evening and weekend minutes". Largest user groups are those with the least to say - teenagers, friends who see each other every day, and people standing in lineups.
7. Schizophrenics popularly fabricate someone to talk to, whether than person wants to listen to what they have to say or not. So do children with 'imaginary' friends. It's also why people have pets, in many cases, and why pets are recommended for seniors' mental health.

'nuff said. We're ready to talk to anything, robotic or not. And pay for it.
Bring the app...

The interesting, or sad thing, is that none of these responses had to do with my original app idea.

Intelligent conversation? Maybe. Interesting? I'll give it that.