Marvin the Paranoid Android

Marvin the Paranoid Android is a character from Douglas Adams' Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He is a prototype of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's GPP feature. Naturally, in accordance with the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's track record with all things robotic, Marvin's personality is terminal depression. Part of the humour of Adams' work is the monumentally excessive responses Marvin has to everyday life.

Classic Marvin Quotes include: "Life! Don't talk to me about life! Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don't know why I even bother to say it. Oh god, I'm so depressed!", and "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they get me to take you down to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't."

Note that although Zaphod Beeblebrox calls him the Paranoid Android, he isn't really paranoid at all.

Throughout the The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (or however you wish to hyphenate it) novels we are never told the question, you know, the Ultimate question to life the Uinverse and everything.

As a consolation prize we are told God's last message to his creation. It is read to Marvin by Arthur Dent and simply says "We apologize for any inconvenience"

Marvin by this time is thirty-seven times the age of the universe due to a bad reckoning with a time machine or two. Upon hearing this message I believe that Marvin says something along the lines of liking that. Then he dies.

I have always felt that this message was for Marvin alone, after all he had gone through. It made me glad that in the end he at least found peace.

When I was younger I once decided to make a Eliza-like AI program. Now me being a young geek I had recently read The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and it being one of the more amazing books I had read to date it was obvious who I'd model it off... Marvin. Of course I messed up and called it Marvin, the Depressed Robot but hey, he was really depressed not paranoid...

For those of you who don't know the original Eliza uses a nifty little algorithm that basicly looks for pronouns and some common verbs and turns them around, "You are stupid." becomes "What makes you think I am stupid?" Well I was 12 at the time and didn't know about pronouns and verbs nor was too interested in learning, so I used keyword scanning. I had 3 sections, computer terms, life terms and family terms. Both computer terms and life terms had a hardcoded response, "Can we talk about something else?" and "Life, don't talk about it." Family terms had a few basic "I don't care about your (insert term)" type things. As a fall back I added some random phrases like "Could you just go away?" and "Brain the...Oh whats the use?"

Of course in practice no-one ever triggered my terms and only the 10 random responses were ever used. What's funny is what happened when I took the whole mess to the science fair. The first day I was the second-most popular project, the first being a Tesla Coil, but by the second day I was the most popular and had a constant 10-20 people trying to get a seat! People were absolutely fascinated by a program with no sound or graphics that just spit out depressive-sounding phrases. And the judges even gave me one of the 15 or so silver medals given out.

Joseph Weizenbaum should have just given Eliza a mental disorder...