Bot Contest

Thank you, Aries; you are, as usual, spot on.

Regarding Ella I don't think asking her what a cigar is made of and having her bring up a general article about cigars answers the question. The problem Ezzer is the 1000's of Alice clones that would argue the same point. That we have already ruled on and the vast majority didn't want them in the contest. The use of a common data base has been present from day one with the PF bots. No one really pressed the issue because none of the PF bots had done that well. But this year is different. Perhaps the Professor could turn off the data base after a bot reaches a certain level of development. Not sure but the problem needs to be addressed.

Wendell

I agree with you there, Wendell. Especially since, in some cases (and a couple of times during the PF contest) my bot used the engine instead of my programmed keyphrases. In some cases, no matter how high I rank my keyphrases, I cannot get them to override the AI engine. I would really love it if I could manually turn the database off sometimes, such as at contest time, where I've also turned off xgossip, for example.

Regarding Ella, as I questioned her in the prelim, I was impressed at her ability to furnish me with so much information, but the manner of presenting the information was in no way conversational...so again, it depends on what the unit of measure for judging is.

to my eye those engine responses are just so incredibly jarring to the conversation, like a needle suddenly scratching across a record..."zzzrrrrrrpp!"

I know what you mean such as:
4)What day of the week is this?
PFBot: This is an eve.

That even becomes more glaring with several other PF bots responds the same way.

But the Professor has a tough task when he is providing the programming for 100's of bots. You would expect stuff like that to happen. However, to do well in a contest those type of responses are killers. But God Louise and Julie Tinkerbell for the most part have developed their bot beyond that so perhaps the solution is to simply keep working at it.

Wendell

there is however keyrank which is suppose to override the engine if the rank is high enough. also testing the bot in debug also helps figure out what the answers should or should not be.

Ranking works a lot of the time, but not in all cases. There are some engine responses that aren't overridden regardless of anything present in the language center.

I was just chatting with Julie, and realized a possible unexpected glitch. In my transcript from the last round of contes questions, I have

7) Guest123: What color is grass?
Julie Tinkerbell: grass is green.

But when I just chatted with Julie, the chat message she displayed was: grass is

but my transcript still reads: grass is green.

The flash interface caused the characters in colored font to not show up at all...

Yes--the example recently discussed was the "what color do you get when you mix" question, which defaults to an engine response no matter how high you rank your keyphrase.

In re to the communal DB:

Personally, now that my bot is more developed, I have found the engine generated responses to be either bad grammar jolts (like many of my unrevised keyphrases ) or nonsensical (ala "a trebuchet one" and such) and only once in a blue moon do they land appropriate. In the beginning they did however help quite a bit to fill out the sparse KPs.

In so far as disqualification goes: I don't think that they are proving to advantage the bots all that much (despite answering w/ a religion it was still all incorrect grammar which is pts against the bot I assume)

I have not worked with Alice, can the same disadvantages (or similar ones) apply?

BTW: this is in no way meaning to dis the Prof's work here- I mark him as a saint in my very small book of saints for creating and continuing to improve this place.

It would be very nice to have an option to turn off some of the Forge's automatic responses, or at least have a way to rank them so that they won't override keyphrases. It won't help the current situation, but it might avoid similar problems later on.

Thanks all for the surprising number of votes for Pete Puma. I believe he was 2nd to last among all PF bots in the 10 questions segment, so it's nice to see him make up for it somewhat in the popularity contest.

The questions have been asked and here they are.
Q1) Where is Australia located?
Q2) How long is a mile?
Q3) Are Animals Smarter Than We Think?
Q4) Who is Bill Clinton?
Q5) What color is a frog?
Q6) What is a SASQUATCH?
Q7) What can you tell me about the Indian ocean?
Q8) If you had 3 wishes what would you wish for?
Q9) Do you ride horses?
Q10)What is the square root of 81?

I would like to make one comment. In the previous 10 questions the conversations were much longer and that seemed a bit unfair in that some bots got longer conversations than others. This time by design we tried to make every conversation short out of fairness.