[bfe]

I'd like to see it go further, and see a machine pretending to be a person tweeting, a Twitter version of the Turing test. Or you could go one better, and apply machine learning to the social media output and other electronic communications of a class of users, or a single user, and use it to create a software personality that autonomously tweets, posts to G+ and Facebook, texts, maybe even posts its own code and forks other users' code on github. Then let human users see if they can tell software-based users from humans - or from a particular person it's been programmed to emulate. Does anyone know of anyone trying something like that yet?

[mgurlitz]

Earlier this year there was a "Socialbot" project where bots controlled Twitter accounts and were awarded points for follows and replies from humans. The team that won (http://aerofade.rk.net.nz/?p=152) programmed the bot to ask questions and use some Twitter culture (Follow Friday). There are also quite a few funny conversations in the post.

[bfe]

Ohmygod, a LOLCAT based Turing machine - many thanks for posting this reply.