Chat-with-an-idiot is an AS (Artificial Stupidity) application which allows a human, as well as a "bot" which can mimic a human being, to type sentences written in the work area and be answered by an Artificial Idiot Entity.

The program provides the following interaction modes:

• Mode 1: human user chatting with an Artificial Idiot Entity trained from scratch.
• Mode 2: human user chatting with an Artificial Idiot Entity trained starting from a text provided by the user.
• Mode 3: two Artificial Idiot Entities having a chat conversation.

The program uses an associative knowledge base to store statistical data of sentence inserted or text fragments provided. The more the user talk to the program, the more the program will answer in a meaningful-like way, so keep patient!

The Text Area

The Text Area is the work area where sentences are typed in by the user and answers are prompted by the program: then user has to append her sentence since the program answers to the last sentence in the text area.
To let the Artificla Idiot Entity to respond press the Enter key.

Menus

Clicking on Manage Idiots menu you have the following features:

• Create and set as current...: create a new Artificial Idiot Entity, showing a pop-up window to enter the Entity name (case insensitive). If you don't create any new Entity, the program comes with a "DEFAULT" Artificial Entity by itself.
• Switch to another...: switch to a different Artificial Entity already registered for the session. Shows a pop-up to insert the Artificial Entity you want to switch to (case insensitive).
• Kill idiot...: this will "kill" the specified Artificial Idiot Entity, thus annihilating its conscience, like tears in rain.
• List available idiots: this will list the Artificial Idiot Entities available for the current session inside the Text Area.

Clicking on Utils menu you have the following features:

• Train current idiot: This will train the current Artificial Idiot Entity with the content of the Text Area. You could train your current Artificial Idiot simply by chatting with him from scratch, but this could be time consuming. So you can train your Artificial Idiot to answer according to any human, provided a representative text fragment (i.e. a facebook post, a document, an article or a speech-to-text output, the sky is your limit...)
• Export idiot brain...: This will save the content of an Artificial Idiot Entity by erasing the Text Area and filling it with a textual representation of the Entity conscience (a JSON text) which could be cut/pasted into a text file for future use.
• Load idiot brain: This will load the content of an Artificial Idiot Entity from the Text Area, where the content of a text file produced by an Export idiot brain operation.

Clicking on Chat menu you have the following features:

• Talk to current idiot: This will let the current Artificial Idiot Entity to talk with the user. The user has to type sentences or questions and then press Enter key to get an answer from the Artificial Entity.
• Conversation between idiots...: This will let the program to talk with itself, by using two Artificial Idiot Entities.

Clicking on Help menu the program will show you this help window.

Because the Text Area is the workspace used by you and the Artificial Idiot Entitities (and even the container of any program message), clicking on the Clean Text Area button will allow you to empty thw workspace.

VERY IMPORTANT:
Actually the Artificial Idiot Entities live only inside the memory of your browser. When you load the application page you start with a DEFAULT Entity. Then you can load Entities previously saved and let them chat with you or between themselves. But if you want to save the actual "conscience level" of an Artificial Idiot Entity you must use the Export idiot brain feature, because if you reload the page all the Artificial Idiot Entities will be lost like tears in rain (quot.).
The next version of the program will provide back-end functionalities to permanently save Artificial Entities and restore for future fun.