If you saw the ads, the trailer, or the movie itself, an obscure acknowledgment in the credits for Steven Spielberg's A.I. may have caught your attention:

Sentient Machine Therapist--Jeanine Salla. Type this name into a search engine and you'll discover an elaborate hypertextual game that, though it may have originated to promote the movie, in fact far exceeds its cinematic "entry portal" in intelligence. You enter a maze of websites connected to Jeanine Salla--a faculty member at Bangalore World University (a global research institution founded in the year 2028) and specialist on A.I. skill acquisition--and stumble onto an intricate murder mystery that extends into the physical world through e-mail addresses and phone and fax numbers for the story's protagonists. Groups dedicated to gathering clues and pooling information formed on the Net--and after some six months of sleuthing thousands of tech-heads have finally unraveled the puzzle. While rooted in entertainment, the game proves an intriguing model for hypertextual narrative and for collaboration within networked communities.