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Racter

 
Games: Racter
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  • Platform: IBM PC Compatible
  • Release Date: 1984
  • Genre: Simulation
  • Style: Miscellaneous Sim
  • Similar Games: Eliza (Commodore 64/128), A Mind Forever Voyaging (Apple II)

Game Description

A more demented version of the conversation program Eliza, Racter would have been called "Raconteur" -- one who excels at storytelling -- if not for the early IBM's lack of long filenames. Racter simulates a conversation with an eccentric individual. In a typical session Racter asks you questions about what you're afraid of, and then asks why you're such a coward. Then it asks you whether you'd like to hear one of its randomly-generated stories. Typical output:

"Phil sang of a hawk during the time that Diane was singing of a jackal. Are you interested? Their yellow mansion actually was fascinatingly interesting, their frightening fantasies were aloof. Momentarily Diane whispers. 'My jackal will chew your hawk, Phil. This infuriated jackal, numberless angry jackals can dream about a hawk then, nervously eat the hawk. Instantly a jackal may chew lamb nevertheless within my expectations I watch an image of unending passion in an enrapturing white light-tube or glass. A jackal is hungry.' 'Well spoke', yodeled Diane. 'By the same token my hawk can wing and fly. Are these your views?' "

Racter is still the subject of some controversy. The creators published a book of short stories and poetry, The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed, supposedly written by Racter. But some computer scientists have claimed Racter could not possibly create such sophisticated work, at least not without serious human tinkering.
~ John Gorenfeld, All Game Guide

Production Credits

Programming: William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter
~ John Gorenfeld, All Game Guide
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Wikipedia: Racter
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Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Wikipedia
“ More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity.
I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber.
I need it for my dreams.		 ”

—Racter, The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed

Racter was an artificial intelligence computer program that generated English language prose at random.[1] 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.[2]

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. [3]

See also

References

  1. ^ Chamberlain, Bill (1984). The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed. UbuWeb, Warner Books. ISBN 0-446-38051-2. http://www.ubu.com/historical/racter/index.html. Retrieved 2009-07-02. 
  2. ^ Chamberlain, Bill, Getting a Computer to Write About Itself, Atari Archives, accessed Aug. 17, 2007.
  3. ^ The Racter FAQ, accessed August 17, 2007.

External links


This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 
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