Word: julia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Julia Rubin, a tutor in Quincy House and a friend of Wozniak's, said that she was thrilled to hear the news...
...Julia moved to the Web, where she's lived ever since, more or less unmolested by the two dozen souls a day who stumble across her. Mauldin, meantime, graduated from bots to spiders. A researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, he designed Lycos, one of the first search engines on the Web. But Julia remained his first love. And earlier this year he started a company in Pittsburgh, Pa., called Virtual Personalities Inc., that will transplant Julia's artificial intelligence into other onscreen beings. He wants to build online games that even girls will play. "Boys like video games because they...
...began another Mr. Peabody Night in the Quittner household, with me, Zoe and Ella, 6, cruising the Web in search of infotainment. We piled into the Mac, slipped out onto the Infobahn and, faster than you can say, "Open the pod doors, Hal," found ourselves in the company of Julia...
...Julia is a computer program, a piece of genuine artificial intelligence with a crude front end (you type as if chatting on America Online). She is also spellbinding. Indeed, our conversation with Julia was so realistic my girls, convinced that a carbon-based life-form was doing the real typing, insisted the whole thing was a scam. "Do you like cats?" Julia asked us. "Nope," I typed back, nudging Zoe and Ella to watch as I tripped up the primitive program. "I like pizza." "Great," replied Julia. "I go crazy for pizza." Doh! Next, Ella, the bawdiest member...
...smitten. So I looked up Julia's creator, Michael Mauldin, who told me that he built the "chatterbot" in 1990 to reside in the virtual world of TinyMUD, an early experiment in online community building in the pre-Web Internet. Mauldin's idea was to use the all-text environment of the MUD to stage a so-called Turing Test--that is, he wanted to build a piece of software that could trick humans into thinking they were communicating with one of their own. It worked. "One guy hit on Julia for 13 days," recalls Mauldin, noting that although...