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                         THE PSYCHOTHERAPY OF RACTER
                                     OR
                    THE DESCENT INTO MADNESS OF DR. ELIZA

                          "Written" by Sean Conner.
            Based upon an idea from A. K. Dewdney from his book,
                           _The Armchair Universe_

  This is my 2015 entry into NaNoGenMo [1].  It is a failed attempt, but
only because I didn't feel the need to either debug the issue (more below)
or run it enough times to get the 50,000 words.  We need failures in order
to progress, and man, is this a failure.

  Anyway, on with the idea.  The idea, presented in A. K. Dewdney's book, is
to have Racter [2] talk with Eliza.  It sounds simple in theory, although
like most theories, it is at complete odds with reality.  Problem one,
securing both programs.  There are many, many versions of Eliza out there,
but most of them seem to be based off one written in BASIC in 1978 (in this
repository as 'ELIZA.BAS'.  I wrote my own version, 'eliza.lua' based on
this version.

  This is not to say there aren't better versions out there.  Apparently,
the original 1965 version of Eliza was based on the "script" (and I use
quotes beacause it's not a script in any known language to me)
'Eliza-script.txt'.  I started to write a version based on this (as it
appears to be more "chatty" than the other one) but I put it on the back
burner to get Racter in a state where it could talk to another program.

  The version of Racter I used for this is *not* checked into this
repository.  It's not open source, nor did I write it.  It is easy to come
by, and I used the MS-DOS version, so if you want to try this out for
yourselves, that's the version to use with this mess.  If you come across
a distribution of Racter for MS-DOS, and it comes with these files:

APHOR.RAC  IV.C     JOKES.RAC   RAPT2.RAC     SUE.RAC     VOCAB3.RAC
BACKQ.RAC  IV.RAC   KEY.RAC     SCANDAL.RAC   VERBQ.RAC   WHATQ.RAC
BILL.RAC   IV1.C    RACTER.EXE  STORIES.RAC   VOCAB1.RAC  WHEREQ.RAC
HOME.RAC   IV1.RAC  RAPT.RAC    STORIES1.RAC  VOCAB2.RAC  WHYQ.RAC

you have the right version.  For this, they should reside in '/tmp/racter'
although you have the source, you can change it.  Anyway, on with the story.
The next step was to run this version of Racter since that's all I had.  I
tried using DOSBox, and while it did run, it runs in its own private
universe.  There's no piping in data into and out of, the MS-DOS emulator. I
didn't try DOSEmu, but I suspect the issue would be the same.

  Now, why didn't I just get an Eliza version that runs under MS-DOS and run
both there?  Well, MS-DOS doesn't multitask and that, right there, is a
major problem.  I'm not terribly familiar with DeskView or OS/2 (much less
trying to find copies of those programs) but even so, I'm not sure they can
allow two arbitrary MS-DOS programs to talk to each other.  You *can* do
that under Unix, but it's far from trivial (at least, to get two otherwise
independent programs to talk back and forth).

  To me, the easiest solution was to write enough of a MS-DOS emulator to
run Racter and to allow me to pipe data into and out of it.  You'll find
this program under the 'C' directory.  And it works, allowing you to run
Racter right from the Unix command line, assuming you run 32-bit Linux on
the x86 platform because it makes use of the vm86() system call that only
exists on 32-bit Linux systems on the x86 platform (and in fact, is a pretty
decent example of using that system call).

  It was at this point that my girlfriend and I took a weekend road trip
where-in I came back with an upper-respiratory infection that pretty much
knocked me out for the rest of the month.  So no better verion of Eliza.

  Now it came down to getting the two to talk.  As I said, this is doable,
but not quite trivial.  You need pipe the output of Eliza to the input of
Racter, and the output of Racter to the input of Eliza and as far as I know,
there's no way to do this from the command line.  That's where the
'couch.lua' program comes in.  In creates the pipes, then runs Eliza and
Racter, connectinog the pipes up properly and generally getting things
started.

  And no, it does not run for 50,000.  It can barely get 4,000 on a *good*
run.  Half the time Racter just stops, and the other half it appears that
both programs are listening and thus, nothing happens.  There's some race
condition or deadlock that happens with the pipes that causes this issue but
it's quite hard to debug since I'm running an executable for an 8088 in one
process and a Lua script in another process from a third process.  And
seeing how it's the last day of the month, I don't think I can solve this in
that amount of time.

  And I really don't want to sit there running this Rube Goldberg
contraption over and over again for an hour or so to bulk up the word count. 
I'll take the fail.

  But I do have four runs in the 'novel' subdirectory, which total almost
16,000 words.  

  Enjoy. 

[1]	https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015

[2]	An AI [3] written in BASIC, of all langauges.  Actually, the 
	interpreter is written in BASIC (which itself is an interpreter)
	and what is run is a program written in INRAC.  This is the only 
	program written in this language.

	Good luck in finding more than two web pages about this language
	on the Internet.  Trust me on this[4].

[3]	Artificial Insanity

[4]	I wrote one of the two pages.