ECTOR is an acronym standing for the French Entité Cybernétique Totalement Obligée de Réfléchir (Cybernetic entity totally compelled to think). It is also a name similar to Hector, the Troyan hero, Achille's enemy. Actually, Achille killed Hector, but I hope here, they will make peace (Achille is a kind of ECTOR's ancestor, see this little story) ;-)
I want ECTOR to be an intelligent chatterbot (more intelligent than Achille, but it is likely that it will not be as impressive as Achille --in the beginning--, it has to learn many things before).
ECTOR is based on a artificial intelligence architecture, I called BAsCET (it is shown, in French, in my PhD Thesis), that is inspired from Copycat, an AI system from Mitchell and Hofstadter.
It is a mix between neural and semantic networks, uses agents and a blackboard. Its Concept Network uses co-occurences to compute influences of one semantic node on another.
Next, I'll present some technical notes which will be used to implement a prototype
There was a PHP version of ECTOR, but it was to slow. There is now a C version, thanks to iraw, at http://ector.soja.org/en/
If you want to look at ECTOR's bookmarks, go here.
ECTOR has a project on SourceForge!
There is a French Wiki for ECTOR: WikTOR.