My program is much simpler than ELIZA, just a hash, really, and a CGI interface. It could probably be almost a one liner if I was a more experienced programmer. The trickiest part was just getting around Perl's taint checking, and some additional security measures on the server.

In a way though, Bot 2 is more "advanced" in that, according to that article. ELIZA could only be updated by manually rewriting the code. I'm intrigued by the possible potential of a program that can be updated or "learn" from people connecting to it and modifying it from all over the world simultaneously. My biggest wory was that with a potential for thousands of people to be able to "teach" Bot, simultaneously, the hash would grow extremely large very quickly. As it is, that did not happen. A million people could say "Hello Bot", and he says hello. They say "how are you" he says fine. The hash is not modified. People's Repertoire of greetings and casual conversation are surprisingly (to me anyway) limited. The problem has been more, trying to get people to converse long enough to find something not already in the hash.

If people could add alternate responses, that might be more interesting. -- Tom