Chatbots are a great place to experiment. I made one for a hosted web chatroom that essentially ran on markov chains of varying accuracy to the source (choose s

Chatbots are a great place to experiment. I made one for a hosted web chatroom that essentially ran on markov chains of varying accuracy to the source (choose something that had the same previous one/two/three words, etc). It would listen to the chats in the room for training data, and optionally could parse and ingest a webpage (blog, wikipedia entry, email, etc). You could then ask it a question, which would make it generate a sentence based on a random word it picked out of the question. The goal was to make something entertaining for the chatroom, and it mostly succeeded with often hilarious results :) Something fun was giving it "personalities" based on input data, for example giving it the timecube website, or read in a person's emails to copy their style.