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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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.
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
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.
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.