This particular agent is called Julia, and was written by Michael
Loren (`Fuzzy') Mauldin (<mlm@cs.cmu.edu>) at the Center for Machine
Translation at Carnegie-Mellon University. Julia is actually the
crowning example of a whole class of similar agents, called
Maas-Neotek
robots, of which Colin is the
name of the prototypical, unmodified robot (available via anonymous
FTP).
Julia is a TinyMUD robot. She can run on just about any
TinyMUD, and there is little a priori reason why, with slight
modifications, she couldn't run on most types of muds, be they TinyMUDs,
MOOs, MUSHes, or what-have-you. She connects as any human player on the
mud would, via a telnet connection-she does
not run on the mud server itself. (This is known as a `client
'bot', as opposed to a `server 'bot', and is based on the distinction
between clients-humans-and servers-the program containing the mud
database.) Therefore, she does not bog down the server, nor does she
have to be written in a mud programming language such as MUSH; instead,
she is written in C, and runs on a workstation in Pittsburgh.
Julia's source code is not available to the general public, because she
has been entered at various times in the Loebner Turing-Test
competition. However, Fuzzy claims that 85%of Julia's code is
actually the same as Colin, the prototypical robot, and Colin's code is
freely available. Many of the transcripts below were acquired when she
ran on Time Traveller, which ran until recently at
<betz.biostr.washington.edu, port 4096>, but has since ceased
operations. Julia is currently (as of April 28, 1993) running on at
least DruidMUCK (<freedom.nmsu.edu, port 4201>), and perhaps elsewhere on
the Internet as well.