A Markov Bot is a simple computer program built to simulate a conversation. Such programs are often designed to engage in small talk with the aim of passing the Turing test by fooling the conversational partner into thinking that the program is a human. Markov Bots pull from an existing text, and create human-looking (hopefully) sentences by stringing together sequences following a Markov chain.
So... how does it work?
Starting from a text like the song "What a wonderful world", you break the text into pairs of successive words (aka bigrams). For instance,
"I see trees of green, red roses, too, I see them bloom, for me and you"
would become "I -> see", "see -> trees", "trees -> of", and so on and so forth. Once this is done, you simply feed the program a starting word, and pick one of its successors at random. For instance, "I" is followed by "see", and then "see" can be followed by either "trees" or "them", and so on and so forth. By applying this over and over again, you could generate for instance the following song:
I see trees of green, red roses, too, I see trees of people going by. I see friends shaking hands, sayin', "I love you."
I hear babies cryin'. I think to myself What a wonderful world
This dojo provides a guided script (and a "hardcore" one) to build a basic Markov Bot - and then, it's up to you! Some possible extensions are suggested, but the main goal is to have fun with text (there are a couple of interesting sample texts provided), and go for it :)