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Project Murphy – An imaginative bot answering “What-if” questions (projectmurphy.net)
74 points by coolvoltage 3683 days ago
16 comments

What if you didn't have to sign into any of those services to play with Project Murphy?
Exactly. And adding to skype contacts didn't work for me on Mint Linux, signed in and launched the app but nothing new appearing in contacts.
Some example images:

"What if Barney Stinson was a woman?": http://imgur.com/l7yVhwj

"What if Harry Potter looked like the artist Savant?": http://imgur.com/ePuWVsd

"What if Mark Zuckerberg was 10 years old?": http://imgur.com/75qGJQC

"What if Donald Trump was a singer?": http://imgur.com/a/1lfVF
"What if Elon Musk was on Mars": http://imgur.com/omnhxZa
"What if Barack Obama was a carrot?" http://imgur.com/WN86vIV
So this takes a sentence of the form "what if <x> <predicate> <y>", discards the predicate, gets a photograph of x and y from a tagged up database, identifies faces from them and merges the face of x into the place where the face was in y.

Well done Microsoft.... very imaginative.

How do you think humans do it?
Felt tip.
Well if you ask this one anything about Hitler/Adolf you get "..."

Some one at Microsoft has learned something as it seem...

EDIT: Whelp nvm i broke it http://imgur.com/UMf2F96 http://imgur.com/VAPtEAt They really need to have a better H filter....

Looks like they fixed it, sort of. Just tried "hit ler" and got "..." so I tried "h itler" with similar results to your own. "Itler" also works.

Edit: "what if itler was in Guardians of the Galaxy"

Really? closed/mobile-app only service?

What if people stop demolishing open web ?

Indeed. They preferred writing 5 bots and a web page, instead of a web page.
Isn't there a Futurama episode about this? Did my brain mis-fire or did I read this and think "The Finglonger" for a reason?
"So that's what things would be like if I'd invented the fing-longer. [Sigh]. A man can dream though. A man can dream..."
These are the most hilarious images I've managed to create:

"what if kim jong un and michelle obama had a baby?" http://i.imgur.com/f7iSIrx.jpg

"what if michelle obama had a goatee?" http://i.imgur.com/VD0tx4w.jpg

"what if kim jong un had a gandalf beard?" http://i.imgur.com/bz8GGGT.jpg

How do I go from this landing page to actually chatting with Murphy? I have messenger installed on my android phone, but clicking the button opens a page telling me to download messenger.
Instead of the button you can also compose a message to @ProjectMurphy
Answering "what if" questions well is essential to AI that actually does something. That's how you test plans. This is what "common sense" is really about. The kind of questions a robot needs answered are "What if I place an auto tire on top of a milk carton?"

This, however, seems to just be another chatterbot.

Just typed in 'What if robots ruled the world?'

No reply after 10mins ... shouldn't I get some sort of error handling/user expectation management if it's a question that can't be answered by Murphy?

Wow it's already gone full Hitler?

http://imgur.com/6SX2pNv

Some pictures are pretty fun like "What if John Cena was a singer ?" but others don't work that well..
This lead me down a dark path.

What if John Cena was ...

...pretty. ...tiny. ...Hulk Hogan. ...in The Princess Bride. (my fave) ...in KISS.

...

This is really dialed back. It seems Microsoft is pretty terrified of another Tay-like event.
What if Microsoft made another chatbot...
I stumbled onto this a few weeks ago, when I installed skype to talk to a friend. I was going to ask the usual round of self referential questions one normally does with chatbots, but it wanted me to take a picture of myself before answering anything. We ended up meeting on IRC and I never thought of it again.