h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Now, if you could just make a AI that was a fanatic in some other religion. Then start a conversatyion between the two. That would be interesting.

Funnily enough, the same idea occurred to Douglas Adams, years ago.

I quote from "Don't Panic", by Neil Gaiman:

"The idea for the 'Reagan' program occurred to Douglas after watching one of the Reagan-Mondale debates in 1984: "It occurred to me that people who have to brief Reagan for a debate such as that have to provide him with the minimum number of facts, and the most all-embracing fallback positions - lines to come up with when he doesn't really know the answer to the question, but has recognised some key phrase, and can come up with a phrase or line that will cover it.

And I thought 'this is exactly the way you program a computer to appear to be taking part in a conversation'. So, with a friend in New York, I was going to do a program to emulate Reagan, so you could sit down and talk to a computer and it would respond as Reagan would. And then we could do a Thatcher one, and after a while you could do all the world leaders and get all the various modules to talk to each other.

After that we were going to do a program called 'God', and program all God's attributes into it, and you'd have all the different denominations of God on it, you know, a Methodist God, a Jewish God, and so on. I wanted to be the first person to have computer software burned in the Bible Belt, which I felt was a rite of passage that any young medium had to pass through."

Sadly, it never got written.

H.