What is A.L.I.C.E., and how it came to be.

A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), also referred to as Alicebot, or simply Alice, is a natural language processing chatterbot—a program that engages in a conversation with a human by applying some heuristical pattern matching rules to the human's input, and in its online form it also relies on a hidden third person. It was inspired by Joseph Weizenbaum's classical ELIZA program. It is one of the strongest programs of its type and has won the Loebner Prize, awarded to accomplished humanoid, talking robots, three times (in 2000, 2001 and 2004). However, the program is unable to pass the Turing test, as even the casual user will often expose its mechanistic aspects in short conversations.

Examples of Conversation Excerpts
Human: Can you tell me something about Stanley Kubrick?
ALICE: Ambiguous: Ask who, what or where is Stanley Kubrick?
Human: How was your day?
ALICE: I was really busy chatting with people on the web.
Human: All day?
ALICE: That seems like a long time.
Human: You learned something new.
ALICE: Interesting gossip: unknown person said I learned something new.

History of A.L.I.C.E
Richard Wallace began development of the program in 1995, while at Lehigh University. The name of the bot was chosen because the computer that ran the first version of the software was called Alice.
The program was rewritten in Java beginning in 1998. The current incarnation of the Java implementation is Program D. The program uses an XML Schema called AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) for specifying the heuristic conversation rules.
Subsequent to Richard Wallace's 2001 publication of an AIML specification, numerous other developers have taken up where Wallace left off, implementing free and open source AIML interpreters in a variety of programming languages, publishing AIML sets in various human languages, and continuing the spread of the technology as a free/open source venture.

Based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.L.I.C.E. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0