Chatting with your friends and family members through text messages is fun. How about hopping in a time machine to chat with a World War I soldier?
The soldier is Archie Barwick, an Australian who died in 1966 but is still virtually alive in text messages through the magic of a chatbot created by News Corporation Australia. In real life, Barwick kept a 400,000-word diary, which is the basis for his conversations.
Here's a sample: "We had a fine tea just before we left the firing line. The cooks brought up as much steak & bacon as you could eat & to spare, plus tea, boiled potatoes & onions mashed together.
"We marched about three miles and bivouacked out on an open piece of ground for the night. We just simply threw ourselves down and slept as we were. To many of us it was the first time we had closed our eyes for six nights so you can imagine how we looked."
Sometimes the question you asked can't be answered, but a similar one can be. We typed: "Can you see the enemy?" Up popped an alternative suggestion: "Thoughts on Germans?" Archie said: "They're a miserable, ragged-looking lot, with a few fine men here and there. I reckon a man is quite justified in shooting the dogs on sight."
To chat with Archie, go to Messenger.com or install the Facebook Messenger app. You can use Messenger for video chats, but not with Archie. If you don't have a Facebook account, it will ask you to create one. They're free. Type "Archie Barwick." Then click "Get Started." Archie will write you a couple times a day.
This raises the question of whether we can have real conversations with computers. The Turing Test was proposed 66 years ago by British mathematician and code breaker Alan Turing. Basically, it came down to whether a human could tell he was talking with a computer.
Since the 1960s, programmers have played around with developing such artificial response routines in an attempt to simulate an actual person. One of the earliest programs was an artificial psychiatrist that would base its questions on what the user typed -- it might respond to "I don't feel well" with "Why don't you feel well?" It was meant to be amusing, but quite a few people took it seriously and began to talk about their personal problems. Some found it easier to talk to a machine.
Programs were also developed to automatically write prose and a kind of free-form poetry. Bob remembers one that started out with the striking line: "The policeman's beard is half constructed." Hard to top that.
The upshot of all this is that advanced artificial intelligence will someday be fully upon us. On the other hand, people like Elon Musk, developer of the Tesla electric car, have warned that when that day comes, we may not be pleased.
Retro Gaming
Monkey Island is a video adventure game from 1990 and still Joy's favorite. (Too difficult for Bob.) Now Tick's Tales: Up All Knight is a retro game in the style of that earlier LucasArts classic.
When neighborhood troublemaker Tick tries to impress the girl of his dreams by drawing a sword from a stone, he draws the ire of the evil goblin Bloodclot. The game has lots of puzzles and the kind of graphics you'll remember from the old days -- if you were around in the old days. (We were recently talking to a 20-something girl who referred to those days as "pre-me.") It's available for PC, Mac and Linux for $8 from Store.Postudios.com, Steam and the Humble Bundle Store.
The July issue of Scientific American magazine, by the way, had a headline article on the value of computer games for brain development. We made that same argument in this column more than 30 years ago. It was obvious then and should be obvious now that children who play video games become better at it by developing a sense of pattern recognition. They are often able to predict what will happen next. People who worry about too much attention being paid to video games are missing an important point: They require an active brain.
By the Numbers
About half of all U.S. households get video from video on demand services, such as Netflix or Hulu, according to a recent Nielsen report.
The average person watches videos 99 minutes per day on their phone, up from 62 minutes last year. We assume they also walk into lampposts more often.
Turn It Down
A reader wrote to say that his online radio is nearly spoiled by loud commercials. He asked if we knew a way to force Windows to play everything at the same volume. Aha! We do.
There's a little icon of a speaker in the lower right of your Windows computer screen. Click it with your right mouse button. Then click "playback devices" with the left mouse button. From here, click on your speaker and click "properties." Move over to the "Enhancements" tab and click. In the long list of enhancements, you'll find one that says "Volume equalization." That's the one. Check it.
Family Safety
Many children browsing the Web have stumbled onto pornography sites. To protect the youngsters in your household, you can tweak the settings in Google or Bing.
Go to Google.com/familysafety or Bing.com/account to select the level of safety you wish. "Strict" on Bing.com means that a search for "bare bunnies" produces nothing worse than an old article about Playboy bunnies, without any incriminating pictures.
Internuts
• "10 Sketching Tips for Beginners." Google that phrase to find some useful information on how to draw hair, add textures, mirror an image or make a silhouette. (People will sometimes say "I just can't draw," but in fact it can be learned.)
• "10 More Enigmas That Defy Explanation." Search on that phrase to find some amazing stories on Listserve.com. For starters, a 19-year-old woman in Minnesota was found frozen stiff back in 1980 after a car accident forced her to walk 2 miles in minus-22-degree weather. When Jean Hilliard was brought to the hospital, her skin was too solid to pierce with a hypodermic needle. Doctors at first thought she was dead, but two or three hours after she started thawing out, her eyes responded to light. Doctors wrapped her in an electric heating pad, and she made a complete recovery. (The website doesn't say whether she immediately moved to Florida.)
Bob and Joy Schwabach can be reached by email at bobschwa@gmail.com and joydee@oncomp.com.
SundayMonday Business on 08/08/2016