If you talk about Hong Kong weather on Twitter and get some sharp yet totally irrelevant rebuffs from a stranger in the United States, don't panic. It could be the working of Chatbot - a piece of software designed to help global warming fanatics to fence with their cyber opponents. Tired of arguing with 'climate change deniers' in 140-character quips - the limit set by Twitter for a single posting - US programmer Nigel Leck wrote a script to do it for him, Popular Science magazine reported. A climate change debate on Twitter thus need not be particularly wearing. Leck's handy solution lets your computer automatically generate arguments and replies for you. Chatbot@AI_AGW scans Twitter every five minutes, searching for hundreds of phrases that fit the usual denier's argument paradigm. Then it serves them up with some counter-arguments. The responses are pulled from a database of hundreds of replies that the software matches to the argument made by the original tweeter. For instance, someone claiming that the entire solar system is warming would be met with something like: 'The sun's output has barely changed since 1970 & is irrelevant to recent global warming', followed by a link to corresponding scientific research. People on the other end of this kind of argument don't usually pick up on the fact that they are arguing with a program and will continue the argument, according to Popular Science. There are some issues to troubleshoot, the magazine said. For one, Chatbot sometimes fires off an argument to someone who is simply commenting on the weather.
