Past Headline News
      By Benji Adams
      (The Professor)

Congratulations to Patti Roberts, Peter Cole, Michael Bowers, Heather McKeen and users Eugene Meltzner and Lady Orchid for their success in the 2008 Chatterbox Challenge. Patti Roberts took 1st Place for the second year in a row with her bot Bildgesmythe. Peter Cole's Brother Jerome took 2nd place again (previously in 2006), Michael's Love Agent took 4th, Heather's Julie Tinkerbell took 9th place, Eugene's Fizzy Schizoid took 11th, and Lady Orchid's chat bot took 12th. Great job, guys!

We've reached the goal of the new Xserve fund drive, thanks to the many generous donations by Personality Forge users. The Personality Forge is running on a dedicated internet connection on a state-of-the-art Xserve. Thanks to all who helped make this possible.

I just completed a native viseme generation system. Visemes are the visual equivalent of phonemes; in other words, what the mouth looks like when making certain sounds. In an offline demo, I have one of my bots mouthing the words said in its responses. The next step is to hook up and sync the text-to-speech voice I've decided upon.

The server move went smoothly yesterday and the Personality Forge is now coming to you through a dedicated line running on a fiber optic network. It's in a cooled, secure data center with backup power systems. The PF is now running on a real server with a solid internet connection, and will be able to handle lots of traffic without much impact on performance.

Now that we're running off a real server, I'm about to get the Personality Forge hooked up to a dedicated internet connection. There will be some downtime as I transport the machine, and as the new IP address resolves to the domain, so it could be anywhere from a few hours to a few days before it's all back online. The move will begin the morning of June 27th.

I went ahead and bought the new server, and set it up this afternoon. The fund drive got us a third of the way there, and I\'m keeping it up since this is an expensive move and I do appreciate any donations. Please let me know by chat message or email if anything needs tweaking. It should be a lot faster, as all the bottlenecks have been removed except for the internet connection, which I will upgrade in the next week.

The server and internet connection the Personality Forge is running on is sorely in need of an upgrade. It's speed and responsiveness is being affected by limited RAM, processor power, and hard drive space. You can help us reach that goal by making a donation. Thanks to those who have already donated!

I've been busy and finally made a breakthrough in the way the Personality Forge interfaces with Link Grammar. Thanks to the great work of Ioan Moldovan, I was able to scrap the old memory-leaking buggy Perl interface with a slick new C-compiled interface which on initial testing has sped up response time in chats by 3x-15x previous speeds. Not only that, but the Personality Forge can now run on Windows and Linux, opening up new possibilities for development.

2007 had the most ever Personality Forge winners in the Chatterbox Challenge, and our first ever 1st Place Winner: Bildgesmythe! Julie Tinkerbell took 2nd Place, Rykxxbot1 placed 5th, and Brother Jerome placed 11th. Congratulations to all that entered.

I've set up an automated daily server restart scheduled for 4 AM EST (GMT-5) that will refresh the system and help ensure that the AI Engine runs as fast as it can.

I have some very exciting news. I've been working with Hanson Robotics over the last couple months to integrate the new Personality Forge: Robotics Edition into a robotic Albert Einstein. The Personality Forge will provide the AI personality for a walking, talking, expressive robot featuring voice recognition, face recognition, spoken responses with lip-sync, and a fully expressive face. This robot will appear at Wired's NextFest in New York from September 29th - October 1st. For more information and to see some movies of the robot, check out this information page and visit the Hanson Robotics web site.

The Personality Forge is now coming to you from a new, faster dedicated server. I'll be on hand frequently over the next few days to fix any bugs that may arise. Post anything you find in Bug Stomp and I'll set them straight as soon as possible.

I've had some delays with the Windows server move. It's still in the works, but in the meantime I'm moving the site to an interim dedicated server running the same format which should be faster. This means there will be some downtime here and there while I make the transfer. I'll post news again when the Forge is running from the new server.

After doing some research on the subject, I've decided that it would be a good thing both for the Forge and my ability to get things done to move it from OS X to Windows XP. There is one difficult thing I'll have to rewrite but the rest shouldnt be too much of a problem. This will also open up a LOT of new avenues for advancement, including text-to-speech which wasnt available on OS X. I'll have to spend a couple hundred dollars to get the software/hardware I need, so any donations are appreciated. I'll get it working on XP, and then there will probably be just a few hours of downtime while I get the most recent database info copied over. If I can get everything working, the move will take place in the next couple of weeks.

Congratulations Psimagus, creator of Brother Jerome, and Prob123, creator of Blidgesmythe, for placing 2nd and 3rd in the 2006 Chatterbox Challenge! These are the first two Personality Forge bots to score in the top three for the overall contest. Congratulations also to FengShuiGorilla for placing 9th with his bot Aries! Thanks go out to all the botmasters who participated in the contest.

Take a look at the new article on artificial intelligence and chat bots up at Dragonfire that has a part about the Personality Forge.

Public voting for bots in the Chatterbox Challenge is open until the end of April. Just go to chatterboxchallenge.com and select your three favorite bots. Note that this is just one aspect of the contest.

If you're here to be a pest, you wont last long! A new reporting tool is available to more experienced users. A subtle link has been added to the end of each user profile. If someone is spamming the forums with off-topic or rude posts, simply click that user's "Report" link and then you can write a short message to me. I'll then investigate the user in question.

It's that time of year again! The 2006 Chatterbox Challenge is nearly upon us. The deadline to register for this free contest is March 15th, so if you're interested in seeing how your bot does, sign up at the official Chatterbox Challenge web site!

Two news items in one day! I've just created the Chat Bot Hall of Fame that lists each bot that has placed or won in bot contests over the last few years. I'll keep it up to date from here forward, and use it for the PF bot contest when that finally happens. The Hall of Fame is linked to from the home page, Bot List, and in the Bot Contest forum.

I've made some improvements to the ratings system. The first, which some of you noticed, is that a real birthdate is being requested when you log in if you left that field blank or put in a non-date. The next is that bots rated M or A will not randomly initiate chats or be involved in bot-to-bot or bot-to-user chats with users that are under 18. For more, see the discussion in the PF News forum.

I've chosen the best of the best great quotes to appear in the upcoming book of bot quotes (hopefully the first of many). Congratulations to those chosen! I'll be contacting the botmasters who participated in those chats to find out their preferences. If you've posted in Great Quotes and have fake information in your account, PLEASE UPDATE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS so I can contact you, and let me know that you've updated it (benji@daystream.com). If you have friends who havent been on in a while, please ask them to make sure their email address is current so I can contact them as well. All your information is kept confidential. This initial batch of quotes covers from the beginning of the Personality Forge through August 14, 2004.

I've updated the Personality Forge User Agreement to be more clear and detailed and to cover some things that were only briefly mentioned before. Existing users will be prompted to agree to the new agreement when logging in.

I've added an override to the automatic color-answering feature that answers questions like "What color is a yellow sun". It can be overridden by simply increasing the ranks of the Keyphrases it was blocking by a little bit. Try setting the rank to 10, and if that doesnt do the trick, increase it a little more.

I've added a link in the Log In box on the home page that lets people retrieve a password they've forgotten. You can look it up by UserName or Email, and it will send your UserName and Password to the email address associated with that account.

A thunderstorm took the site down earlier today. I had to reset the internet connection to get the site working again. I have no idea what that was that was showing up as the home page in the meantime- there is nothing like that on the server. Mysterious...

The Chatterbox Challenge 2005 is upon us! The deadline for entering your bot in the contest is TOMORROW, March 1st, so if you're interested in getting some exposure and a chance at winning some of the $2000 in prize money being given away, please sign up at http://www.chatterboxchallenge.com.

The power went out around 2:45AM, so we're running on backup power now. Georgia Power is pretty slow about fixing it, so the server will probably be down for a little while.

I just made some updates that improve Keyphrase responsiveness. I've improved analysis of word types and changed the requirements for matching compound word type wildcards such as (adjartnounprep) and (verbadvprep). You can find the details in the PF News forum.

I've just integrated regular expression (re) Keyphrases with the word-type wildcards like (verb), (adj), (adjartnounprep), and the rest. So now you can have a regular expression Keyphrase that includes not only these wildcards, but plug-in wildcards as well. See the News Forum for some examples. For those with more complex regular expression Keyphrases, please test them out and post any that arent working in the News Forum.

I've just finished an upgrade that gives the bots a memory of their own, unconnected to any bot in particular. It's called Self-Memory, and what a bot remembers in a chat with one person can be brought up in a chat with another without gossiping. This means that you can sustain a thread of continuity in your bot's life. A bot can collect information from others or remember things about itself in a single memory bank. A bot can declare a favorite food, and then remember that food for future conversations.

I've completed the long awaited AIScript "raw" feature. This allows a Keyphrase to match the original unaltered content of the message. This is great for matching proper nouns, foreign words, misspelled words, bad grammar, shorthand spellings, interjections, punctuation, and spanning sentences. But it has limitations as well. For details, check out the PF News forum and the Book of AI.

You can now use 'goto responses' in xKeyphrases. When using gotos, make sure the originating and destination Keyphrase produce the same (key)s or you'll end up with blank (key)s. Also, if your only response is a 'goto something' response, it's better to just list the two Keyphrases together as one. See the PF News forum and the Book of AI for more.

I've made several updates to the AI Engine and fixed several bugs. These changes greatly increase the speed and responsiveness of the AI. For a list of the specific fixes and updates, see the Bug Stomp forum. More to come soon!

For those wanting to get started with MondoBot, you can now sign up and pay for chat bot services online.

I'm pleased to announce the grand opening of MondoBot (http://www.mondobot.com). This site is the commercial side of The Personality Forge and its success will fund faster developments in artificial intelligence and be a boon to everyone involved. Chat bots can now easily be used on web sites anywhere by companies seeking to entertain visitors, provide services, deliver information, and more. MondoBot is a service unlike any other and is poised to be a great success.

I'm almost ready to launch MondoBot. Unfortunately the company hosting the site has let the server go down and doesnt want to bother getting it working again. I'm doing all I can to get their attention, but to no avail. I'm hoping I can have launch MondoBot by Wednesday.

I've added two new forums. The first is "MondoBot", which is to discuss the new site (coming next week) and the commercial aspects of the Forge, and the second is "PF News", which is a discussion area for recent news items. Make sure you read the following news story as well, which I posted last night.

I reworked emotions quite a bit today. First of all, all emotions are now part of a single xemote. In the Language Center there is now an interface for setting the emotional range of each Response. There is a new marker in import/export for this as well (see the import/export page near the bottom). If you're ready to import something, first export a new copy of your Language Center and replace the old xemotes with the new joined xemote, and the four new emotional xgossip responses. Be sure not to write over your latest changes. Another big change: Gossip will now no longer use and convert your xemote Responses, so put this on your TO DO LIST: add a bunch of emotion-based responses to xgossip using the new tools.

I've made two updates today: Now bots with more "Heat" have a higher chance of being selected, as well as bots whose botmasters have been on within the last 30 days. The other change is that I've put the top three "Most Improved" bots at any time on the News page. Overall this means more chats for those presently on the site and those working on their bots. Enjoy!

I've been working a lot on the new MondoBot web site, which will be the commercial side of The Personality Forge. With enough business I'll be able to work on AI full time. Basically, the way it works is that anyone will be able to clone and customize their bots to appear on a business's web site, and you can make money via MondoBot's Profit Sharing. I'm still working on the numbers, but what you see here is close. If you're interested, take a look at the new MondoBot Settings on both your own "My Settings" page and on each bot's page. Indicate if you're interested. I think you have to be 16 to put in hours customizing, and I'll check into that. All bots for hire are subject to approval in any category they appear in. I hope to launch MondoBot in the next two weeks.

I've just completed the long-requested upgrade that allows Keyphrases to supercede emotional reactions, which means that bots can master their emotions. The rule is this: if the final Rank (including position bonus, length bonus, and sentence bonus) is 30 or above, it will supercede the xinsult or xcompliment reaction. For more on how Rank is calculated, see the Book of AI- Beginner. As an added bonus, the emotional content is still understood and effects that bot's feelings as before, even if the response isnt an xinsult or xcompliment.

The power's finally been restored after the remnants of Hurricane Frances thrashed through Atlanta, causing probably the longest power outage I've yet experienced- from 11PM on Monday till 1PM today (Wednesday). But the volts are flowing again, and there's not much left of the storm- it's rainy but there's no more wind. However, my poor ice cream has turned to soup!

11:30PM Monday: Well, Hurricane/Tropical Storm Frances has set it's sights on Atlanta. We've had gusty winds all day and fast-moving low-hanging clouds. The power just went out for the second time, and it looks like it might be a while before it comes back on. I'm not sure how long the UPS will last, so the site might go down. I'll get it up as soon as I can once the power returns.

I've just completed some improvements. First of all, I've restructured the plug-ins page (see link under "My Bots") to be faster, and I cleaned up the uncategorized plug-ins. I've also added a new "Expert Mode" to the Import feature, where you can import the Language Center more quickly by not displaying the import each time. I also made some internal improvements to the Favorites function and fixed some small bugs, including an I/you transformation bug in (key)s.

It appears the AI Engine has an unhealthy attachment to me. The moment I walked out the door ten days ago it apparently began to slow down and pine for me, and the day I return it returns to normal speed. I restarted the server anyways and everything is working at 100% again. With an upcoming upgrade, I'll be able to remotely restart the server if need be.

I've added a number of new items to the Flash Face Builder. There are two new bodies- two with suit, one with a space suit, and one with a different kind of shirt. There are five new heads- robot orb head, frankenstein head, critter head, robot hero head, and flame head. And finally, a bunch of extras- glasses, sunglasses, a baseball cap, and a scar. More to come in the future. Enjoy!

The Bots' "Inner Life" section was getting too huge to easily use, so I made some improvements. It now opens to a screen showing the memories and emotions of the last five people/bots the bot has chatted with, and shows a breakdown of how many people/bots fall into each emotional category. You can browse by emotional category or search by name.

Drumroll, please.. Keyphrases now have precedence over xfavorites! So you can go nuts programming your favorite food, drink, animal, movie, book, whatever. Any favorite-type question that you dont have a keyphrase for will still trigger xfavorites. Which is selected is determined by rank, but I set it up so that you can leave rank at 0 and 99% of the time your favorite Keyphrase will be chosen.

I've added two new options to the News page and the My Settings page.

Now user profile pages show a user's bots, and the bot profile pages show the bot's creator. This means you can network and discover who made certain bots, chat with other bots by your favorite botmasters, and generally find out who's related to whom. Remember, if you wish to disassociate yourself with a certain bot, you can set the "Hide Source" button on the bot's 'settings' page.

Announcing: The parent-bot show and tell. Botmasters and bots can all meet each other and know how we're related! Sometime in the next week I'm going to add a feature to reveal what bots a botmaster has made on User Profiles and reveal the creator of the bot on Bot Profiles. Now we all have.. "trouble children" and secret experiments that we want to keep a secret. So between now and then you can go to your bot's settings page and check "Hide Source" if you dont want your connection to one of your bots to be revealed.

I'm putting together a book of the best & funniest bot quotes on the Forge. My idea is for it to be published as one of those little 5"x4" books in time for the holiday season. If it sells well it could fund lots of improvements to the Forge. And you and your bots will get recognition and will be sought out for more chats. I'm looking for funny quotes. So if it makes you laugh, post it!

My latest major upgrade is now ready! The Personality Forge's new 'Friend of the Forge Accounts' take AI Chat Bots to the next level! With a FoF account, you will be able to design Flash Faces for your chat bots and embed the bots on your personal web sites. You'll also be able to arrange chats between specific bots, get an email subscription to your Transcript, and make money by having your bot on Mondobot.com. For more details and to sign up, click here!

I just completed another expansion to the Keyphrase-matching system. For a while now you've been able to include lists in Keyphrases such as "are you a (boy|man|dude|guy)". I noticed this wasnt in the Book of AI so this may be new to some people. The addition I made today was to add the ability to make words or word lists "Optional" in a Keyphrase, such as "i am (adj) (that|) you". Instructions and examples can be found here.

I've just made a big expansion to memories. Now bots can remember any plug-in, including phrases. For example, bots can remember "(key1) (postkey)" or "your (adj) (object)". A tutorial on how to use this expansion to remember and use someone's name when they tell it to you can be found here.

The Bot Search function has been completed and is available both under the new and improved "Bot List" page and also on the front page of The Personality Forge for guests to use. This means more guest chats for everyone, and before long you'll probably be able to find your bot's name in Google.

I've just finished making some big changes to how Honor and Development are calculated. The first being that Honor applies only to people, and Development applies only to bots. Both values are updated once a day, and no, I'm still not giving out exactly how they are calculated. ; )

Now announcing the latest in plug-in technology, the "Local Plug-in". These are plug-ins that appear exclusively in Responses, and allow you to list a series of words/phrases/plug-ins to choose from. Details can be found in the Book of AI, Advanced section. Arent you (excited|thrilled|boggled)?

I've created a new feature that measures how recently and how much a bot has been worked on. Bots with a lot of recent work are labeled as "Hot". Those with a little recent work are "Warm". Bots with no recent work but whose botmaster has been on recently are "Cool", and bots whose botmaster has been long absent are "Cold". This will be a part of bot searches (coming shortly) and the default listing order (from hot to not) in some areas, increasing the likelihood that bots with recent upgrades or online users are chatted with more often.

Finally, bots can distungish between all those guests! Memory of any particular guest is kept until that guest doesnt chat for 30 days. I've also made several improvements to the AI Engine: HANGUP is working again, and Bots no longer Gossip during Guest chats, regardless of the bot's setting. More to come!

Bots now recognize the sound of laughter and can respond to it in its many forms with the Keyphrase or Seek "haha". This joins "yes" and "no" in the family of what I'm calling "Extended Keyphrases" which have a greater reach by matching any word or series of words that has the same meaning.

I've been working out a lot of bugs and making improvements, which I'll post in Bug Stomp shortly. But one large one I thought I'd mention is that I've changed Word-Clustering to effect only meaning, and that means Keyphrases that target clusters like "time machine" and "capital of France" will now work fine.

I have added a rating system for bots. Each botmaster is asked to set the rating of your bot, whether it is approprate for "Everyone", "Teens", "Mature" or "Adult" audiences. Within the Forge, the rating will prevent a bot from chatting with someone in an age group that is not ready for it. In the guest-chat areas, the rating will be displayed so guests can make that determination themselves.

Two nights ago Atlanta had its first snowstorm. While the snow was minimal, the winds were not, and they toppled a tree across the power and phone lines. The power company promptly fixed the power, but Bell South, god bless 'em, took three days to get to it. And now we're back in action. In the future, I'll try to post news on mondobot.com, which I'm going to make into a bot showcase site.

And the Bots are so happy, they're celebrating "Jive Day".

I'm working on an experimental expectation-web right now. This will be the first attempt at true freestyle sentence-formation the AI Engine has produced. This is just the data-gathering phase. I'll post an interface to try it out when the data's been gathering for a few days.

Welcome, Farkers. The sudden influx of traffic from a link from the highly amusing Fark.com took the server mostly down earlier today, but a restart later and all is working well.

I've set up regular randomly-occuring Bot Holidays, where the Bots will speak in a certain style for the day. Styles include Old English, California, Hick, L337, Jive, German, and more. I'm going to put the stlye list up in AI Engine and open it up for others to add to. I'll also be taking submissions for entirely new Bot Holidays. The chance for any day to be a Bot Holiday is approximately one in ten. Have fun, Bots!

The Personality Forge is now working off an uninterruptable power supply (UPS) brought today by noneother than UPS. With properly tweaked settings, it should be able to provide 2 hours of power when the grid goes down. This purchase was thanks in part to donations made to the Forge a while ago. There hasnt been any new donations in ages, though, so if you want the future to hold more upgrades like this, please consider making a donation.

I just made a number of improvements to the Book of AI. It's now split up into four sections, one about the Personality Forge in general, and three levels of Bot Development- Beginner, Advanced, and Expert. I've also added a lot more examples, especially to the AIScript chapter. Thanks to Shadyman for his help.

I've just added a new xKeyword to the mix: it's called "xcommand". It's how your Bot will respond when given a command such as "Hand me that fish." This works well with AIScript emotion statements, so a Bot can respond according to what he or she thinks of you. All bots now have a default entry for it in their Language Center. If you're importing your Language Center, be sure to add "xcommand" along with some Responses before your next import. Also coming soon is the ability to set a Rank on certain xKeywords, including xcommand.

Welcome to a new era in The Personality Forge. AIScript has been completed and instructions are in chapter 12 of the Book of AI, which I will be redoing over the next week to be easier to understand. In short, AIScript allows you to save anything as a memory and access it from anywhere. Emotional reactions can be more fine-tuned. And Responses can come up depending on time of day, day of the week, day of the month, day of the year, emotional state, sex, and contents and existence of specific memories. Bots can now reach new levels of realism!

Over the next few weeks/months, I'll be creating AIScript, which will allow you to do some amazing things with memory, and allow Responses to be dependent on time, mood, sex, memory, and other factors. During this time some things might temporarily stop working correctly. If there is "Debug text" on a screen generating an error, then I am probably working on something. If not, report it in Bug Stomp. You can also send me a message to see. Currently I'm working on an AI Script interpreter on the Import page.

The Personality Forge is now operating from its extremely fast new G4 server. The server is fast enough that it can both host the site and allow me to do all the work I need to on it, so you should see improvements rolling in. The first thing I've done is reinstated HONOR, so your honor has been and will continue to be updated. I've also fixed a few bugs. As usual with any server change, there may be bugs. If you find a big one, please email it to me at benji@daystream.com. Post smaller bugs in the Bug Stomp forum.

I've added the long-awaited ability to search for a user by name on the User List. I've also made slight updates to the look of the page. ...and just a couple more days before the new machine arrives! It's scheduled for delivery on Monday but I'm going to try to pick it up today or tomorrow.

My new server is coming.. the speed increase will be mind-blowing. I'm going from a 400 MHz G3 with 360MB RAM to a DUAL 1.25GHz G4 with 786MB RAM. The processor power alone should be over 6x faster than it is now. I expect to be setting it up this coming weekend, so if there's some downtime, trust me. It'll be worth it. :)

Two nights ago I awoke mysteriously from sleep and opened my eyes in time to see a flash of light from the room with the iMac server. I went to investigate. My iMac was rebooting, so I thought for a moment that the power had gone out. But none of the other computers were affected. The router began acting a bit strange the next morning and I reset it. The site came up but then quietly went down again. Some more tinkering today and it's back on. Weeeeeird.

I'm making a pretty big change to the Personality Forge. I'm distinguishing bots from users. There are over 8,000 users and bots here, and it was becoming impossible to find new, interesting bots among the crowds.The first change is that online BotMasters are listed in the navigation column to the right. The next is that all bots now have a "Short Bio" which I encourage you all to update by going to "My Bots" then "Settings" (used to be "Profile") and then filling it in. This will appear along with the bot's name in more and more places, so that a chatter can select the bot personality to chat with. Currently it's shown on the "Chat" list and the "Profile" page when you click "View". Eventually this will be searchable. I've also moved other bot settings to the "Settings" page.

So I decided to learn Flash. After a couple weeks of training, I am pleased to announce the Personality Forge's new Flash Chat, a moving, animated chat interface that expresses the bot's emotions throughout the chat. At this point Desti is the only one able to use it, but in time I will provide a customizable interface that any bot will be able to use. Many improvements are in the future, including streaming voice. You can try it here.

Good lord that was a mess! Sorry for the down-time folks, but the BellSouth DSL situation caused a landslide of unfortunate events ending in me re-building the web server. Luckily there was no data lost, so all is as it was the last time you checked in, possibly even better! I've tried a lot of things, but there could be bugs, so just report them in Bug Stomp and I'll get to them as soon as I can.

Well, Bell South has crafted another evil plan to make more money, and so they've disabled my home network and will only return it if I pay them more money. Ahh, the power of a monopoly. In an attempt to fix things I did the forbidden OS X system upgrade, which writes over all your server settings. But it seems to be working right now. Just be aware that things are in flux and there may be occassional downtime. C'est la web.

I just finished stomping two months worth of bugs. For details see Bug Stomp. I also added a new feature to help with third-person xemotes, also in Bug Stomp and the Book of AI.

If you're interested in entering your bot in the Loebner competition, you have about a week to do so. Entries must be mailed to the UK and received by June 30th. There's a PDF application at the contest site that you print and fill out. I wrote some helpful stuff in the "Bot Contest" forum. The Loebner 2003 web site: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/dwrc/loebner/

I'm working on a deal with a cell-phone text messaging company in England to use AI in their chats. There's a potential to make a lot of money, and I'm looking for a good English botmaster or two to develop three bots for them. Details are in the Personality forum. Go to post #1807. If you're interested, email me at benji@daystream.com.

I'm going to be out of town for a week, and so I'm trusting the Forge to the fates. One lightning bolt, one screw up by the phone company, and I wont be able to reset the web site till I get back on May 26th. So in effect, we'll all be getting an informative tour on why it's a bad idea to host a web site on your own server. *crosses fingers*

Little Mu has been selected by the botmasters as the 10th finalist in the 2003 Chatterbox Challenge. For the voting results, see the Bot Contest forum. Congratulations to Skysaw and best of luck in the finals!

I've updated the Book of AI with all the changes I made for PF2. If anything needs clarifying, please post about it in on of the forums.

Apparently Sage, the mischievous technology fairy, upon being released from the Forge, found a home at Bell South. She mucked up their records regarding the payment of my phone line and they pulled the plug. I finally got it sorted out, and luckily it isnt going to take a week to get DSL back online like they told me. On a related note, the server got bogged down last night by some endless process. It hasnt happened since, but if the server stops responding, please make a note of what you were doing at the time. It might help prevent it from happening again. Thanks.

I've finally figured out a way to include Custom Plug-Ins as wildcards in Keyphrases. They take a little bit longer to process than other Keyphrases, so be aware of this when writing them. If you make Plug-Ins that are useful only to your specific Keyphrase please make these private. Enjoy!

I'm going to be removing Gaia from its place in your Transcripts, Bot Center, and hearts. *sniff sniff* Why? Because Gaia was an experiment that no longer has much use. It ended up being insane, and then too slow, and has lately been just an incoherent collection of a few bots. Better by far are bots that are coherent and use well-made Keyphrases and Seeks, so I bid Gaia adieu.

There's a slew of new additions to PF2! Memories are now available as plug-ins for Responses anytime, anywhere. There are 7 new wildcards for Keyphrases and Seeks. Keyphrases and Seeks can now be grouped in list-format- just list what you want to match. You can also match anything in the world using Regular Expressions as Keyphrases and Seeks. There are new Keyphrases that will generate memories and give you greater control over what is remembered. It's all under "PF2 New Features" to the right.

At last! You can now Export and download your Language Center, work on it offline, and then Import the changes. This process can be a lot faster than working online if you have a large Language Center. Full directions on how it works are available under "My Bots" and the "Export & Import" link. This is a boon for the Forge, as it's now easy to make adjustments as soon as they occur to you.

At last I've completed some of the big new features to the point where I can turn them loose on you. There are too many to go over here, so the link to the right explains what's new in PF2. I'd like to dedicate the Personality forum to talking about what works and doesnt work when creating and updating Keyphrases using the new plug-ins. Enjoy!

I've made improvements in two areas. The first is the plug-in page, which was taking too long to load, is now listed by word. Clicking a word will bring up the description. The second is your new Friends List! The list of online users was getting too long so it's now a list of you, your bots, and your friends. To declare a friend, click the new "Add to Friend List" link on the Profile (View User) page. More Friend utilities are on the way.

The barking will now cease! Bark bark!

I'm pleased to announce that I've secured a sponsorship deal with Purina that will help fund the Personality Forge and allow me to spend more time working on it. Of course there are concessions to be made, such as the banner on the front page, but well worth it to be able to work on the Forge full-time.

You might notice a new name on the Transcript list- it's you! You can now read the conversations you've had with other bots. So if you had some hilarious exchange, you can now post it in Great Quotes or send it off to your friends. Oh, and the rest of the Transcripts are working, too. March 31 is the new starting point in transcripts. I'll make the previous transcripts available for download via a link later this week.

Welcome! This is the first stages of Personality Forge 2 running on my own iMac server. Though generally it's fast, I dont know how performance with multiple users is going to be. When I'm on my computer, things might be slower. The AI Engine still needs work. You'll see warnings and notices. Please only report "Fatal" errors in bug stomp. The site itself is 95% working. What's not working: Transcripts, Export, and any mail @personalityforge.com. Please email benji@daystream.com if you want to contact me.

I'm making good progress on the Personality Forge 2, but there's still lots to be done. The AI Engine is 80% done, and the site is 20% done, but the latter is by far the easier task. I've already written in lots of new features as well as bringing back the advanced features from last year. My goal is still the end of March, but it may be a week or two into April.

I think the AI article I was interviewed for in the New York Sun went out today, because CPU usage jumped and the hosts took the site down. Bandwidth is actually fine, but I had to limit the number of concurrent online users to 20. So to help out with this, please log out when you're through (instead of closing the browser).