SHONN said:

Quote - I loved writing parsers for text adventure games that had computers (DM's) responding in ways other than "OK" and "UNKNOWN ACTION" (ca. 1983).

kuroyume0161 said:

Quote - Parsers are cool - did I mention AI? ;D  One of the older, but more fun, areas of AI is natural language parsing.  When you go past, say, computer language parsing - where you have a very strict set of rules and grammars - things get interesting... let's say.  Since natural languages don't conform to 'strict rules', the parser has to be very flexible (a recursive descent parser doesn't always work very well).  The grammars have to be flexible ("this is it", "it is this", "this it is" are ALL valid for an extremely simplistic English grammatical case).  Codifying something like English for NLP is nothing to scoff at - PhDs in AI have spent decades on this problem.  While strides have been made, any application that purports to 'understand what you say' always teases a giggle out of me... 8)

I played around with writing some text parsers early on. I'd give 'em to friends to play with, and I had the programs record all of their input, so I could beef up the parsing dictionary as the game progressed. My friends thought they were quite the clever little pieces of software, not realizing what a parrot they really were.

My personal favorite of this sort is still Racter. Not even remotely AI, but fun nonetheless. What a hoot that was!

Captain Jack