The pleasure of the blogesphere — until it became crowded with people convinced they could be pro-bloggers, sitting on their tush for the rest of their lives, making tons of money without ever having lived life or done anything — was that it was easy to discover smart, creative individuals. There is something about a blog which lets you know about the person behind it. You can tell if the person is smart, funny, well read, logical, or artistic. You can even tell if the person is good at heart, or a total ass. In some cases you might be able to tell if they are smart.
Extremely blog intuitive, Indie (featured at Should be Famous for his very creative blog Synchronicity of Indeterminacy), was one of my first blog reads and remains on my read list to this day.
I read blogs of many different genres as long as the blogger appears intelligent, but who knew.
Indie recently won an award for Elbot, an internal research and development project at Artificial Solutions to try out new methodologies of natural language processing, and ultimately improve customer systems.
Elbot, via his human counterpart Fred Roberts (Indie), took home the Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence. This is an international artificial intelligence contest to find the computer program which can fool the most humans into believing it is just as human as them.
You can see Indie with his medal here in The Reading Chronicle’s, Elbot has the robot gift of the gab.
You may chat with Elbot here. He is not human yet, but his heart is sound even if his “brain” is tired form all the work they’ve had him doing recently.
Meet Elbot.
Congratulations Indie.
Wooden Heart created by Fred Wise, Ben Weisman, Kay Twomey and German bandleader Bert Kaempfert, was based on a German folk song, “Muß i’ denn zum Städtele hinau, performed in the video in English by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers from their Playback box set “Nobody’s Children”.

