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Just type in the questions you want answered. - BIJOY GHOSH

For all the technophobes out there, here is some good news. Wait a minute: if you were a technophobe, why would you be reading the technology feature at this moment? Oh well, let's say a good technophile friend has brought it to you to read. So, what is the good news? Computers blowing up spontaneously? Well, we are fixing that battery problem.

What else could be good news?

How about this: a typewriter with which you can have an intelligent conversation? Yes, we are talking about a robotic typewriter that will accept questions that you type in and types the answers out on a sheet of paper.

From the Great Beyond, as this installation is called, was created by the artist Fang-Yu "Frank" Lin exploring the concept of the Internet as an entity and playing on the Turing Test. (The Turing Test, by the way, was proposed to test a machine's ability to perform a human-like conversation in 1950.)

Some conversations seem very human and others seem a little weird (perhaps making them more human). Interested? Go on to http://a.parsons.edu/~linf/projects/beyond/ and watch some output and video.

I only wish my computer could tell me what book I should read next and give me an author bio and an abstract!

N. Nagaraj

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