Slashdot Mirror
End of an Era: Forum 2000 Closes
Ex Machina writes: "After nearly 4 years on the net, the great artificial intelligence project Forum 2000 has closed. For the uninitiated, Forum 2000's artificial intelligence constructs -- the SOMADS (who ranged from Tux the Penguin to Einstein) -- answered questions from 'drones' on the Internet. It is being reported on at: Fake Forum, True Meaning of Life, and Conversatron."
Forum2000 was the one of the best Internet hoaxes around. Questions were fed to students at a college by a web interface, then answered in imaginary personas. Submitting a question to Forum2000 was like getting a private consultation from literary figures, naked females, computer hardware, or a crack baby. Many belly-laughs were had while scanning the Hall Of Fame.
Forum was so well written, one got the impression of almost a tailor-made cartoon strip. SOMADS (personas) were always creative, and the answers were sometimes helpful.
All of this was done, from my understanding, by a group of bored college students. If Forum2000 displayed the wisdom of the average college student, then the future of the world has nothing to worry about. I really will miss the wit and wisdom that was dispensed through the cold and heartless system which is the Internet.
Farewell, Forum, and good luck to its creators in whatever line of work they plan on persuing in the future.
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I think Ayn Rand would have been a slashdot troll. "The GPL is CRIMINAL"
"Using OSS defies Reason"
Well, I'm surprised that nobody's tried to create a SOMAD/Slashbot yet. It wouldn't be too hard to do one that could do the following:
et cetera.
Oh. Never mind, then.
We already have enough search engines masquerading as AIs around. Look at Ask Jeeves, preferably before they go bankrupt.
If the Forum is indeed gone for good, it is indeed a sad thing. The Forum 2000 deserves every kudo, not only for some real top rate humor writing over the years, but also for inspiring a complete genre of internet humor.
And I must say, the timing of this story was excellent. Had this been posted during a weekday, our humble internet connection would surely have perished.
Good luck Corey and Andrej! No hard feelings, I hope.
Conversatron High Command
According to the Andrej Bauer SOMAD (regarding the spelling mistakes):
"Hello? What part of trained on Usenet don't you understand?"
That said, it was, of course. a hoax... though an extemely entertaining one.
Garg
Garg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
Hoax? Sure, a few people thought it was real, but some people took Johnathan's Swift's "A Modest Proposal" seriously, too.
Steven E. Ehrbar
This is not true. Yes, there is a 'real' peterb. Yes, I am he. Yes, the Forum 2000 SOMAD was based on me (or more accurately, on the entire output of my usenet postings and postings to internal CMU bulletin boards over 10 years ago). But that does not accurately reflect who I am, or what I do. The guys at Intelleq thought it would be cute to use my reviews as input to the matrix, and I agreed, but that's about the extent of it.
And while I happen to think Debbie Does Dallas is a fine movie, pornography is certainly not the only thing -- or even the majority of -- the so rts of movies I review.
While on the one hand the notoriety has been great, it's really kind of irritating when the SOMAD acts like a sex pig in public and then I get email from some strange woman wanting to know why I said those awful things to her. Trust me. Notoriety is overrated.
I cannot even begin to tell you all how many countless hours I spent reading f2k. I'd often laugh so hard that my eyes would start tearing up and my sides would ache.
I remember seeing a network TV magazine show (20/20 or Hard Copy or whatever those interchangeable network TV magazine shows are) about a guy who was told by his doctor to stop watching Seinfeld because this guy would laugh so hard it was messing him up. Hmmmm, I think I may have chuckled at Seinfeld a couple of times. I think I found f2k as hilarious as this guy must've found Seinfeld.
The ultimate for me was definately "What is a Finite State Machine?" It's in the hall of fame...it should be required reading for every programmer.
All good things...
Doug ---- Co-host of Ghostly Talk
As Ayn Rand's SOMAD would say, "CRIMINAL!"
Emerson Willowick: Thinker, Writer, Human Being.
Forum 2000 Hall of Fame is cool too. Go there. Amuse yourself. In the words of SOMAD Tux: "Good luck and remember- Windows sucks. Use Linux!"
adamp@andrew.cmu.edu
Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
Forum2000 wasn't a joke? It was a real AI experiment. Scary.
(from the current running personae on the Forum)
[ simulated persona = "Corey Kosak", node #28, max search depth 63%, neural variance 14.571 ]
Jesus fucking Christ we're getting Slashdotted again
[ simulated persona = "Corey Kosak", node #54, max search depth 50%, neural variance 27.972 ]
This is NOT how I wanted to spend my final few minutes before death
-Earthling
-Earthling
"I'm sorry, I had to; the irony was just too thick."
The question about my fair lady actually made the wall of fame here. I kept a copy at http://trisomy21.dhs.org/f2k.html in case the one on their server disappears. Anyways, have fun all, /me is going on vacation for a week, bleh.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Why do you simply assume anyone who thinks this is "troll"? The site is more than well enough done to give people not familiar with it the impression that it is real (the incongruent stuff actually enhances this effect to a degree). Further, the story doesn't say a thing about it being a humor site, and at least as many replies to the story say its real as that its a hoax. In other words, it is a perfectly understandable that those not familiar with Forum 2000 might think it was real (even for a lot of them). Just because you know its a joke doesn't mean everyone else does.
It seems to me that some people are being a bit paranoid (and harsh to say the least) in assuming anyone who thinks the Forum was real is a "troll." Even a very bad troll could come up with something better than that. Methinks a lot of thoughtless folk are flaming nieve innocents, and jumping to unfounded conclusions about "trolls." (Ignorant != troll, troll != gulible.)
This is incorrect and misleading. While the incoming messages are posted to the Zephyr message system, this is merely provides a quick&dirty way for myself and others to monitor the Forum 2000 site remotely. The Zephyr interface also parses a few admin commands that the site understands, such as reboot, ban user, and the like. We used zephyr because it uses Kerberos authentication, so it's easy for people to administrate the system remotely and securely.
[ simulated persona = "Corey Kosak", node #116, max search depth 32%, neural variance 19.664 ]
All I have ever wanted is to get a GIF of the shaved ass of spicy Latino Gnome hottie Miguel de Icaza.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Explained? If you want that go to a news site. This is a place where people post "First Post" at #27, train penis birds to sit on garbage and live out some convulted fantasy involving natalie portman and hot grits. (I don't want to know any more about that one...) Probably the best thing to come out of /. (except for one or two good replies to each article), is the humor factor.
The slashdot effect is a nice way to kill off web site, as well, but I don't think that gets classified as 'good'.....
enjoy
-Space for rent
Assuming that this isn't just smokescreen to conceal the hoax, it seems to be pretty good, if brief, background on how Forum2000 works.
If you bought into that load of obfuscated technomumble, you must feel right at home on AOL. :-)
And if you had actually read Andrej's page instead of the how it works page, you'd have noted that Forum2000 is listed in the 'entertainment' category (as opposed to his 'work' links...)
"I will gladly pay you today, sir, and eat up
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
The Forum was one of the great advocates of the Unlambda programming language I invented. The Matrix's program, initially written in C++, had been entirely rewritten in Unlambda for efficiency and clarity. Now what will I do without this precious illustration of the power of that programming language?
Not to mention how useful the Forum's advice was (though it must be said that The Cube was the most sensible and reasonable SOMAD, the rest being, well, a bit artificial in their manner of speech), and how cute Andrej looks - ahem, well, I'd better be going.
Even though me and a friend knew this thing was a hoax (well I did, he still isn't sure), we were actually gonna go up to CMU sometime soon to go see the guys who run/fake it. Anyways, F2k has helped me make many decisions, and its decisions have always been dead wrong, but they still helped. I think the funniest thing that came from it was when my friend was bitching about playing drums in a school play, and PeterB replied, "go smoke some weed, then play drums, it will help". Also, when presented with questions about asian girls PeterB's "Mmmmm...asian girls" comforted me while Jet Li's "STAY AWAY FROM MY SISTER!!" had me scared to talk to any asian girls for a long time. F2k made me stop using it after Dr. Laura accused me of being raped by an asian nanny, that's just wrong.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
After seeing some of the postings in here (ie. First post; Hot grits; goats.cx, etc.) I wonder if Slashdot was also an experiment in artificial intelligence.