| Oh, yeah. Back to the future. Does anybody besides me remember the psychoanalyze-pinhead feature in venerable versions of Emacs? There was a script that offered a parody of Rogerian psychotherapy. For example, you could type, "I'm anxious" into it, and it would respond "Do you feel anxious because of something that happened in your childhood." And there was a script that blurted random Zippy-the-pinhead quotes, like "Are we having fun yet? Are we? Are we?" "Life is a blur of Republicans and meat." The psychoanalyze-pinhead script connected these two together. So you'd get stuff like "Tell me more about a blur of Republicans and meat and your mother." Emacs was pretty fast. You could get a few hundred kb of absurdity in a few seconds. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA