Next: Julia's utility: simple Up: A prototypical agent: Previous: A prototypical agent:

Introduction

This particular agent is called Julia, and was written by Michael Loren (`Fuzzy') Mauldin (<mlm@cs.cmu.edu>) at the Center for Machine Translation at Carnegie-Mellon University. Julia is actually the crowning example of a whole class of similar agents, called Maas-Neotek robots, of which Colin is the name of the prototypical, unmodified robot (available via sourceforge^*).

Julia is a TinyMUD robot. She can run on just about any TinyMUD, and there is little a priori reason why, with slight modifications, she couldn't run on most types of muds, be they TinyMUDs, MOOs, MUSHes, or what-have-you. She connects as any human player on the mud would, via a telnet connection-she does not run on the mud server itself. (This is known as a `client 'bot', as opposed to a `server 'bot', and is based on the distinction between clients-humans-and servers-the program containing the mud database.) Therefore, she does not bog down the server, nor does she have to be written in a mud programming language such as MUSH; instead, she is written in C, and runs on a workstation in Pittsburgh.

Julia's source code is not available to the general public, because she has been entered at various times in the Loebner Turing-Test competition. However, Fuzzy claims that 85%of Julia's code is actually the same as Colin, the prototypical robot, and Colin's code is freely available. Many of the transcripts below were acquired when she ran on Time Traveller, which ran until recently at <betz.biostr.washington.edu, port 4096>, but has since ceased operations. Julia is currently (as of April 28, 1993) running on at least DruidMUCK (<freedom.nmsu.edu, port 4201>), and perhaps elsewhere on the Internet as well.

^*Ed note: used to say "anonymous FTP" and point to a specific tarball at a now-dead link