The Verbot (Verbal-Robot) was a popular[1] chatbot program and artificial intelligence software development kit (SDK) for Windows and web.
In 1994, Michael Loren Mauldin, founder of Lycos, Inc., developed a prototype chatbot, Julia, which competed in the internationally known Turing test, for the coveted Loebner Prize.
Mauldin was one of four grad students who devoted a large amount of time to building a program called "Rog-O-Matic" capable of retrieving the amulet and emerging victorious from the dungeon[citation needed].
In this version of the test, the human has no reason to suspect that one of the other occupants of the room is controlled by a computer, and so is more polite and asks fewer probing questions.
Julia slowly developed into a more and more capable conversational agent, and assumed useful duties in the TinyMUD world, including tour guide, information assistant, note-taker, and message-relayer.
Julia's job was to explore a virtual world consisting of pages of textual descriptions, with links between them, and to construct an internal map of that world and answer questions about it (including path information such as the shortest route from one room to another, and matching information, such as which rooms contained a certain kind of object or textual description).
Sylvie was born and her abilities were expanded greatly to include interfacing with computers and control systems via her serial ports.
In 2005 Version 4.1 of the Verbot Software was released with many feature enhancements and bug fixes, including built-in support for embedding C# code in outputs and conditionals.