Write like a man

Hu-man, that is. The March issue of the Atlantic has a piece about the Loebner Prize, which is essentially a competition for "most human human" and "most human computer" that follows the basic rules of the Turing test. Humans try, through instant messaging, to convince a human interlocutor that they're real people and not programs, while programs are run that are designed to convince the same human judges that they--the programs--are actually human.

It's a good article, and it leaves me wondering whether any of these programmers have tried studying literature. After all, if your job is to create a clump of text that gives the illusion of a human consciousness, there have been people trying to do that for millennia--they're called fiction writers. Critics of the structuralist school loved to point out that what we called "characters" are in fact simply repeated words/signs (e.g., "Maggie Tulliver") that tend to be clustered close to other repeated signs ("duty," "brown eyes," "unruly hair," "love for Tom") and skillfully arranged to give the illusion of a real human psyche. If you studied how the idiosyncratic agglomeration of traits and preoccupations makes a character seem real, and how a slightly distracted (i.e., not "on the nose") dialogic style makes conversation feel human, it could help a lot in designing a program that could fool judges for five minutes.

To all you programmers reading this: we can split the prize money.