Virtual Personalities, Inc. traces its technology back to Dr. Michael Mauldin's work as a graduate student and post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University; and its artistry back to Peter Plantec's work in personality psychology and art direction.
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It was therefore only a very short cognitive leap from Julia to Lycos, another robotic agent that explores a virtual world made of hyperlinked pages of text, and which answers questions about those pages.
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In 1994, Dr. Mauldin, Founder of Lycos, Inc., developed a prototype Chatterbot, Julia, which competed in the internationally known Turing test, for the coveted Loebner Prize.