“A geek with a hat” talks about his Haskell code that tries to input poems and randomly output new ones that look sufficiently poetic without being jibberish.

On a related note, I remember when I still tooled around on IRC, I ran across a bot written in perl with a Markov chain algorithm that would input conversations and depending on how you toggled the parameters, output some convincing conversation back. It floored me when I’d go back and look at the chat logs of it and some people were actually trying to talk to it!

Is that close enough to pass a Turing test?

Uh, doing some superficial searching shows there’s been a lot of progress in this area. Kinda creepy in a way.