Aristotle, Socrates and Rand in a Kant Fight!

June 1, 2010 6:43 AM

Ages ago on the webs, there was a forum which purported to be AI, but which wasn't. It consisted of many philosophers, answering questions. Where is it? Is there an Archive?

Philosophers like Aristotle, Kant, Socrates would be asked questions, and would battle it out in the forum.

There was also an Oracle, if I remember correctly.

It was billed as AI, but then someone figured out it was a distributed network of people on a campus who had access to the various accounts and could answer in the voice of that philosopher.

Many, many threads of these historical figures arguing was tremendously funny, but apparently I can't find it on the Goog.

posted by tomierna to Religion & Philosophy (6 answers total)

That would probably be The Internet Oracle.
posted by Parade of Horribles at 6:51 AM on June 1, 2010

Best answer: There were a couple of webpages on this theme. Does 'Forum 2000' sound familiar? As far as I can tell, that particular page is down now.

Wikipedia has the ones I recall summarized under Q&A Website.
posted by Fully Completely at 7:00 AM on June 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Oh yeah! Forum 2000, created by Andrej Bauer @ CMU. Fun stuff.
posted by reptile at 7:02 AM on June 1, 2010

Best answer: I recall this one clearly. It's not the Oracle. It was forum 2000. It closed a while back. Was funny as hell. There's a similar site running here. Not as funny as the original.
posted by splice at 7:02 AM on June 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks all.

I still read The Internet Oracle, so I knew it wasn't that.

Forum 2000 is exactly it. Sorry that I missed its passing.
posted by tomierna at 7:46 AM on June 1, 2010

Still around on the Web Archive. It closed in Aug 2000, so anything before that date should work. Some of the Ayn Rand stuff was hilarious. If this were around today I'm sure there'd be a book deal somewhere.
posted by geoff. at 8:05 PM on June 1, 2010