Talk:Racter

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I understand the general disbelief of a computer program writing such a book. However, I think this article needs to be revised as it gives a very strong biased view that the book was not composed by the program, however provides no evidence for this.

-- I agree with the person above. I owned a copy of Racter and, while it was never able to do some of the things seen in the book, it was a lot more than just Mad Libs. In fact, it was less a chatterbot and more a grammarbot because while you could 'chat' with it, its responses usually made no sense in context. While coherent in and of themselves, they were clearly generated from random words arranged to be grammatically correct. Racter was an impressive program for its day and I think that the book was less a hoax and more a product of very selective editing of many, many pages of Racter's ramblings.69.231.93.176 15:10, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Cf Infinite monkey theorem -- 201.50.123.251 12:03, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Those claims come from the cited Racter FAQ, which includes some examples of the source code used by the published version to create sentences. It's from those example that the Mad Libs simile comes. The FAQ seems to evidence some disappointment that the output of the published version does not strongly resemble the prose of the published book, but its claims seem reasonably well substantiated.

I also removed an unreferenced tag. The claims made in the article were in fact supported by the external links given, which were cited as "external links" in older style rather than as "references." I added some notes indicating where specific ideas came from. - Smerdis of Tlön 16:15, 17 August 2007 (UTC)