Other popular chatbots – PARRY and Racter.

PARRY
PARRY is, besides ELIZA, the other famous early chatterbot.
PARRY was written in 1972 by psychiatrist Kenneth Colby, then at Stanford University. While ELIZA was a tongue-in-cheek simulation of a Rogerian therapist, PARRY attempted to simulate a paranoid schizophrenic. The program implemented a crude model of the behavior of a paranoid schizophrenic based on concepts, conceptualizations, and beliefs (judgements about conceptualizations: accept, reject, neutral). It also embodied a conversational strategy, and as such was a much more serious and advanced program than ELIZA.

PARRY and ELIZA (also known as "the Doctor") "met" several times. The most famous of these exchanges occurred at the ICCC 1972, where PARRY and ELIZA were hooked up over ARPANET and "talked" to each other.

Racter
Racter was an artificial intelligence computer program that generated English language prose at random.
The name of the program is short for raconteur. The sophistication claimed for the program was likely exaggerated, as could be seen by investigation of the template system of text generation.
Racter was written by William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter. The existence of the program was revealed in 1983 in a book called The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed (ISBN 0-446-38051-2), which was described as being composed entirely by the program. According to Chamberlain's introduction to the book, the program apparently ran on a CP/M machine; it was written in "compiled BASIC on a Z80 micro with 64K of RAM." This version, the program that allegedly wrote the book, was not released to the general public.

However, in 1984 Mindscape, Inc. released an interactive version of Racter for DOS, Amiga and Apple II computers, developed by Inrac Corporation. The published Racter was similar to a chatterbot. The BASIC program that was released by Mindscape was far less sophisticated than anything that could have written the fairly sophisticated prose of The Policeman's Beard. The commercial version of Racter could be likened to a computerized version of Mad Libs, the game in which you fill in the blanks in advance and then plug them into a text template to produce a surrealistic tale. The commercial program attempted to parse text inputs, identifying significant nouns and verbs, which it would then regurgitate to create "conversations," plugging the input from the user into phrase templates which it then combined, along with modules that conjugated English verbs.

By contrast, the text in The Policeman's Beard, apart from being edited from a large amount of output, would have been the product of Chamberlain's own specialized templates and modules, which were not included in the commercial release of the program.


Based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARRY and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0