Peter Answers

[NiX]

I didn't put this under the useless section cause I'm not making the topic to highlight the site, but an idea that I need help with in regards to the site. A little background on the subject before I get to what I'm looking for help on..

The site is PeterAnswers.com and there's a wiki on how to use it. The novelty wore off once most the people in my class figured out the trick behind when the guy doing it messed up a few times on switching from the petition to the question. Either way, I was talking to a friend after and came up with the idea to make it less simplistic and a bit more complex.

Here's where I need the brains of F13. My idea is to make the same type of page but take out the secret typing part. I'm thinking of something where there's a person actually answering the questions through a GUI or some sort of simple interface by connecting to a SQL database or something. Is this possible? It's become a sort of social experiment to see if people will fall for it again when even they can ask a question and get an answer. It's pretty easy to make this work because I'm in a "mobile" program which means everyone has to have a laptop that's in the business program at my school. So the person answering (me) looks like they're just messing around on their laptop while everyone stands around watching the questions be answered.

[voodoolily]

Insert petition:      Peter, please answer:   
         
Insert question:    Why am I so bored?
Peter answers: The theosophical semantic of the question is not valid.

[voodoolily]

Insert petition:     Peter, please answer:    
         
Insert question: What is boredom?
Peter answers: The souls are getting closer, keep trusting.

[schild]

P: Peter, please answer:
Q: Ever heard of Alice?
A: This topic is not very interesting.

He's right.

[NiX]

I hate both of you. In a good way.

[schild]

Only old people and compsci majors should get my joke...

[Yoru]

Only old people and compsci majors should get my joke...

Asking about Eliza would have been more oldschool and apropos.

However, your version also works as a knock on American McGee. :)

[pxib]

That depends on how convincing you want "messing around on his laptop" to look. You can have selectable common words and phrases like "because", "and", "you",  and whatnot... and you can have the computer try to complete partial sentences into complete ones... which will generally produce the sort of stilted dialogue one expects from genuine psychic websites. It can also capitalize and punctuate for you. Trouble is, people will ask specific questions so ultimately you'll need to type a word or two.. like "blonde" or someone's name. You can write up some quick code to turn numbers into their text equivalents.

I dunno. It's possible, but it's awkward and you'll look like you're up to something.

[NiX]

Well, more or less the person typing in the question will be 4-5 feet from the person actually responding. There won't be a real clear view of the laptop that's responding to it all. Sadly, most of the people in the business program aren't too up and up with technology so they wouldn't really get what the person responding is doing on their laptop unless they took the time to actually read it all.

Either way, I'm not really worried how it looks on the responding end. I'm more concerned with if it's possible to make a front end that'll take a question, query it to something (SQL..etc), post that to say a shitty UI that the responder can actually use to send back the "result" and have it posted back to the page where the question was asked. Like whatever I reply with being posted where "Peter Answers: Blah" is.

[Samwise]

You mean a web-based chat program with a slightly different look on one end?  Yeah, I think that might be possible.   

Also, the thing in the OP is pretty awesome and more elegant than a multi-computer setup IMO.  I have a friend who's really into magic tricks; he'll get a giant kick out of this.

[Sky]

P: Peter, please answer:
Q: Ever heard of Alice?
A: This topic is not very interesting.

He's right.

Ya'll can both KISS MAH GRITS!

[Nonentity]

P: Peter, please answer the following question:
Q: Why are MMOs so grindy?
A: I'm really mad at you.

:(

[NiX]

You mean a web-based chat program with a slightly different look on one end?  Yeah, I think that might be possible.   

Also, the thing in the OP is pretty awesome and more elegant than a multi-computer setup IMO.  I have a friend who's really into magic tricks; he'll get a giant kick out of this.

What's the best way to go about it? Especially with one end having to look more like PeterAnswers and a lot less like a chat.

I agree that PeterAnswers is a lot more elegant, but we want to see if people will be just as gullible and if they'll think to check if an outside source could be the one giving the answer. Considering the original prank was done by the same person that was typing the question, it'll be interesting to see if they just check that and then believe it again.

[Signe]

Who the fuck is Alice?

[bhodi]

American McGee made her his bitch.

[Strazos]

If possible, I'd work a delay into the posting of the answer, so it doesn't look like you hit enter and they "suddenly" get a reply.

[Lantyssa]

Who the fuck is Alice?

Alice.

The picture was of Flo, a rather unforgettable character.  Well, until she got her own spin-off.

[schild]

Alice is a number of things. A few of them have been mentioned in this thread. Also, ALICE is a chatterbot. Goddamn chatterbots. I was, as Yoru mentioned, going to use Eliza originally. But so many incarnations of Alice are less interesting.

[WayAbvPar]

Who the fuck is Alice?

Damn it, now I feel like guzzling Guinness. Even more than normal.

[Samwise]

What's the best way to go about it? Especially with one end having to look more like PeterAnswers and a lot less like a chat.

Assuming you've already got a web-based chat gizmo that you can modify (i.e. one that's open source, or that you wrote yourself, or that you otherwise have and understand the source to), fiddling with the front end is just going to be a matter of changing some HTML.

[voodoolily]

Dude Samwise do you have some sort of moray eel avatar? Cool.

[Samwise]

Yeah, I went to the Monterey Aquarium a couple of weeks ago.  I saw this eel saying "yarp" over and over again and thought it would be a good avatar.   :-D  More pics here.

[voodoolily]

Those are great pics.

[schild]

The jellyfish avatar is great.

[Miasma]

There was an article in the NYT a little while ago about deep sea creatures and had a few pictures of the odder creatures.  The two sharks aren't deep sea.





Frilled Shark:


Very ugly Goblin Shark:


My favourite:


Kill them all with fire I say!

[Samwise]

I want one.  All of the above.  Weird fish are cool.

I actually looked into the logisitics of keeping pet jellyfish after coming back from Monterey, since I figured something so dumb and simple couldn't have very complex requirements.  It turns out they're really difficult, though, because they need specially designed aquariums (multiple types of filtration, specially designed water flow, refrigeration, no corners... the cheapest model I found online runs about $2k).   Who knew?

[schild]

There's a giant enemy crab in that picture.