Anthrobotics (Phoenix, AZ) has a "humanoid" or chatterbot that legitimately discusses the artificial worlds in which it lives. See for a brief technical description. [Marty Stoneman , comp.ai.nat-lang, 03Jun97.]

Kevin Lenzo has several infobots that inhabit Internet Relay Chat (IRC) forums, learning facts and answering questions. The most notable one is url, who lives on #macintosh and several other channels. When someone asks where a resource might be found, url volunteers any relevant URLs that it knows. It also responds to commands -- such as "url, status?" -- given in conversational or telegraphic English. Url has been alive for 2 years, and knows over 30K facts. It can look up error codes, country codes, host addresses, vendor addresses, WHOIS info, etc. If you have ICeTEe installed, you can just click on any URL it gives you in order to jump to the page. Two other infobots are hocus and script. The latter is an online FAQ/manual for the Ambrosia game Avara. Infobot source code will eventually be made available. [, comp.ai.nat-lang, 02Jun97.]

PENC, Servile Software's "free knowledge base of human information" for knowledge developers has been updated, at and . [Matthew Probert , comp.ai, 24May97. David Joslin.]

You can download a free alife simulation called "Roach!" from . It's written in a new "APE Dialect" development environment from Neutronics Technologies Corporation. [Lee Kent Hempfling , comp.ai, 18May97. David Joslin.] (The site is loaded with hype. For instance, Roach! is said to be "the world's first learning, thinking, and intelligent program.")

Erik Max Francis offers a set of artificial life links, at . [, comp.theory.self-org-sys, 30Apr97.]