imran*ali

Something I’m beginning to love about the iPhone platform is the chance to revisit long-forgotten applications, breathing new life and mobility into software that’d otherwise disappear into history.

Earlier this month, Visuamobile’s Dominique Leca informed me of the launch of an iPhone edition of the ELIZA artificial intelligence algorithm, based on Joseph Weizenbaum’s work in the mid-60. ELIZA mimics a conversation with a psychotherapist by relfecting the patient’s words back at them in a kinda of pseudo-conversation that almost passes the Turing test!

Visualmobile’s Eliza AI, mimics the sparse command line interface of earlier incarnations and like it’s predecessors, is an amusing curio and marker in the history of artificial intelligence research.

To further deepend my nerd nostalgia, Conway’s Game of Life, is also now available for iPhone, developed by Alpheccar as LifeGame, a handheld simulation of ‘cellular automata‘.

Sadly, neither application has exploited the sensing, imaging, locative or mobile features of iPhone – it’d be interesting to see a crowdsourced Eliza (wait, is that Twitter?), or a Life algorithm driven by the proximity of other iPhone users.

Despite, this I’m holding out for EA’s upcoming iPhone edition of Wolfenstein – I’ve heard it’ll be an augmented reality played out in the real streets of your city ;)