If you're old like me, you probably remember all those old text based RPGs.

You are in a small room with exits to the North and East. There is a dwarf here holding a small potion.

> Tell dwarf his beard looks nice

I don't understand 'Tell'

>

They were viable on low powered machines, didn't need fancy graphics, but they all had a fundamental issue - limited understanding of English.

Now thanks to the miracle of machine learning, we can do better. There's a wonderful (GPT-2) ML model behind http://www.aidungeon.io/ - it runs as a (hosted) Python notebook, and basically it has a rough understanding of how narratives work.

It will just run with whatever crazy stuff you come up with, like a really good DM.

Here's a sample:

You are oceanloader the preposterous, a wizard living in the kingdom of Larion. 
You have a staff and a spellbook. 
You finish your long journey and finally arrive at the ruin you've been looking for. 
You look around and see that it's exactly what you expected. 
A ruined city with a tower in the middle. 
The tower is made of obsidian and has a hole in the top where a dragon once stood. 
The city was destroyed by an explosion of magical energy

> levitate up to the top of the tower

You float up to the top of the tower. As you do so, you notice that there are two people watching 
you from above. One is a man with a mohawk who wears a leather jacket and jeans. 
He looks like he might be a biker or a gang member

> tell the man i need his boots, his clothes and his motorcycle

You grab the man's hands and say "I need your boots, your clothes and your bike". 
"What? What the ****?" the man says as he begins to run down the stairs. "Get on my back!" you shout

> flap my arms and jump off the tower

You fly off the tower and land on the ground below. The man has now come out of hiding and is looking at you with a mixture of fear and anger.

> transform into an enormous hamster

You turn into a huge hamster and begin running around the area. 
Eventually, you find yourself in front of the man and he runs away.

> eat his motorcycle

You get the idea. It's kinda silly but I like that it just riffs on what you throw at it.

It also learns from interacting with people - so the Internet being what it is, it'll become absolutely insane by Christmas.

As it happens the next part of our cloud project is focussing on ML, so this is an interesting introduction for me.

Github link to the source is at the same URL.