DR SHNOOK is a tribute to an early A.I. (artificial intelligence)
program called ELIZA. In ELIZA, the computer plays the role of a
psychotherapist. You tell ELIZA your problems, and she responds
with surprisingly relevant answers.

DR SHNOOK is just the same, except it uses no intelligence --
artificial or otherwise -- to concoct its responses. It merely
selects phrases at random from a canned collection.  Most are
whimsical, a few are rude, and very few are profound. Needless
to say, DR SHNOOK was written purely for amusement and should
in no way be construed as a serious attempt at artificial
intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning,
nor any other respected science.

DR SHNOOK was written in QBasic, a programming language that
Microsoft bundled with MS-DOS 5.0. Unfortunately, QBasic did
not include a compiler, meaning that it could not produce
stand-alone EXE files for wide distribution. However, one day
in 1993 or 1994 I found a computer at my high school that
had a BASIC compiler. Although it was not for QBasic per se,
its dialect was close enough to QBasic's that I was able to
produce a EXE without too much difficulty.

Sad to say, I have lost the source code to DR SHNOOK; all
that remains is the EXE file that I made all those years ago.
If I still had the source code, I would certainly release
DR SHNOOK as open source. But if you want to reverse
engineer it, you're welcome to view the executable in a hex
editor or something -- more power to you!

May this program bring you a few minutes of mild amusement,
because that's all it was really meant for! :-)

Enjoy!

Geoff Draper
2 March 2006
