The AI Engine

Wildcards can't be used in that way, unfortunately.

Concerning synonyms for hello, 'hi' works, but the bot will only recognize it at the beginning of a conversation. This is to keep bots from saying hello to one another all day.

Sort of, you just don't put anything at all.
Thus
KeyPhrase: I want to talk about
== Well, I hate talking about (subj)! Let's talk about fish instead.

It will also check that something does indeed follow the keyphrase, since a line with (subj) in it won't be activated unless there is something to put in the subj.

Back to the xfavorite thing. Look at it in debug. Type in a sentence and the first two questions you'll see are emote? and favorite? Then it checks against keyphrases. Type in 'What is your favorite potato' and it the response comes back straight away. It goes through emote? (which I think is disabled) then to favorite? You will not see your really long list of keyphrases, because it hasn't looked. If you type a response and it isn't a favorites question or something you have covered in a keyphrase then it looks at xnones, xnonsense, memories and gossip, not necessarily in that order.

Is there any body who can help me writing a same type of program or can tell me a url from where i can download a similer source code

Similar to what?

If you mean the coding for a similar AI bot, the people behind ALICE give out the coding for you to tinker with, but it's not half as easy to understand as this is. The address is www.alicebot.org if you're interested.

Yeah, but I'm getting bots who don't recognize hi at the beginning of a conversation. At least what I consider the beginning: my bot says hi, the other one says hi back, my bots get immediately confused. Is the "beginning" considered only the first line, regardless of who says the first line?

On the favorites: Someone asked my bot about his favorite color long before I expected to have to deal with it, but the randomizer actually _did_ come up with his real favorite color! (Or as close to it as makes no difference). Of course, I don't want to trust to luck in the future, but I think I've got a workaround for that now, just by changing the xphrase to something that doesn't call up an answer.

On the wildcards: I'm not sure I trust (subj) to be specific enough -- I've already seen bots misusing it aplenty. And what I really want is a within-word wildcard rather than a within-sentence wildcard. For instance, I want to be able to use 2* to mean any number in the twenties, without reference to what follows the space after the *. Or the "reverse plug-in" I described would work even better. But if it's not possible, it's not possible, I suppose. I'll live anyway. :-)

Thanks for the answers, guys.

Okay, new question! My bot has been -- quite uncharacteristically -- greeting guest chatters by calling them "friend". I thought at first that it must be simply plugging in "friend" when it didn't have a (name) to access, and I "fixed" it by taking (name) out of the xhello responses. But I'm going through the transcripts now, and it _is_ using Guest instead of name, the way I expected. So now I'm confused about where the "friend" is coming from. Help?!? My bot likes being antisocial! (Oh, and _that_ subject.... both my bots seem to decide they like people rather easily, with little provocation. How do they decide whether they like someone or not, if they haven't talked long enough to invoke any of the emotion-ranked keyphrases?)

The bots use "friend" for the (name) plugin when talking to guests. If chatting to a member, they say the member's name.
Ex "Hi friend" if I wasn't logged in, or "Hi Shadyman" if I was logged in

The beginning of the conversation is the first line, no matter who says it.

Okay, thanks. Then where does the Guest come in? (As in, where the transcript says "Hello, Guest")