Mark V Shaney lives!

I'm guessing you boys are all too young to remember... For those who haven't seen the AMFM style stuff before he/it looks like little more than yet another run through the "Markov Chains" text re-processing game.

It works (kinda) like this. Take a bunch of texts; newsgroups, and these days forums are ideal sources to use as seed material; and feed them to your program. Depending on how you set the knobs you can then get it to regurgitate a new text with 'characteristics' of the seed material. It tends to be a little 'stream of consciousness' at times but can pass for a native speaker, albeit often a somewhat deranged one.

First seen in the net.singles newsgroup in the mid 80's care of the guys at (back then) Bell Labs. At the time, according to Pike, they were still iterating and manually selecting output that looked good.

Try

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V_Shaney

or searching for "Mark V. Shaney" ('Markov Chains' geddit?) for more details.