Nice job! I corresponded with Hutchens back in the day about MegaHAL. What made it stand out compared to other Loebner chatbots was that it didn’t just zoom in

Nice job! I corresponded with Hutchens back in the day about MegaHAL. What made it stand out compared to other Loebner chatbots was that it didn’t just zoom in on a couple of keywords in the user’s input and then run a forward-only chain - instead buiding both forward and backward Markov models, generating text in both directions along with calculating entropy/surprise to produce a novel response.