Bot Contest

Bev...let me put it to you this way. You got a 100 bots looking at you. That's about how many entered last year. How are you going to decide which of those bots deserves to be winners? If you had to sit down and talk with each bot personally how long would that take you? Even if you could would that be fair. I would say absolutely not because each conversations you had would be different. Many would claim well the conversation you had with my bot was a lot harder than the conversation you had with his bot. Your so called entertainment value is way to subjective to be judged fairly. What's entertaining to you may not be entertaining to me. That doesn't mean entertainment value is totally dismissed. Judges are human and obviously would favor a bot they personally thought was fun to talk with as oppose to a bot that is a pain in the butt. That extends even further with things like ease of use. If a bot takes forever to respond a judge can get frustrated rather quickly.

Bottom line is if you or anyone has a better way I'm more than willing to listen. It may not happen this year but there's always next year.

Wendell

Wendell:

I brought up the "where is mars" question as a random example and didnt mean to infer that the whole contest is based on trivia. In thinking about it though, a large portion of Human interaction is based on trivia that segs into deeper meaning (Like: "Did you see that insert-tv-show last night? Geeze, what would you do if you were in that situation?"). The more trivia that 2 people share, the more that they have as springboards to speak on deeper topics, and too the more likely they will enjoy eachother's company. The same can be said of Bot to Human relations.

If there are people who are saying that the CBC is a triva game exclusively I still wouldnt take that as too large of an insult considering how much of human behavior, relationships and interaction is based on it.

1% essentia, 99% trivia = the average person's entire life.

Oh dear. Wendell, I was sincerely apologising for sounding snotty. I know it's hard to run a contest, and I honestly think you do a good job. Sometimes I type without thinking things through.

I can't give you suggestions because I'm not the competitive type. I know some bots are better than others (and mine are not very good compared to most)but I don't really like to rank things. To me each bot has its own strengths and weaknesses, and though I'm very impressed by the good ones, I don't feel the need to come up with a way to score them. So I'm useless, really.

Your contest is a lot of fun and I've seen a lot of great bots because of it. Thank you again for all the effort you put into it. I really think you do a good job.

I have a question. Someone put a comment in the questionaire about my bot. The comment is not in english and it looked like the person didn't have a clue how to talk to the bot. Well, the comment is rather nasty. So, how can that get solved, to prevent people (who obviously didn't know what they're doing) from making rude comments?!!?

I just noticed that - I'd suggest emailing the admin by clicking on the smiley face at the top right-hand corner of the box, and ask him if he can remove it.

Yeah, I should do that then, psimagus, thanks.

Oh dear. Wendell, I was sincerely apologising for sounding snotty.
Bev said it very well, I just meant that there are so many bots here, that never seem to get the credit they are due, and I just wanted to say how much pleasure I get from talking to them. I meant nothing against the Chatterbox Challenge!

Hi, I see that the comment section on the CBC website is going to be a problem. Unfortunately, I can't handle monitoring all the bots so here is what we are going to do. Each botmaster is going to be responsible for their own bot's comment section. On each post you will see a red circle with a yellow x in it. Click on that circle and you will be able to delete the post by entering a password. So in short if you find something offensive you can delete it. You will need to e-mail me for the password as each bot with have a different one. Please use d_cowart@yahoo.com

Wendell

Thank you Wendell. That's a good idea.

Wendell- I just checked the CBC comments section for Janet666 and noticed I have about 20 pages of "Great site!" comments... Do you want to transfer those to a site comment place or should I just get the password from you and start the deletion process?

Any chance that comments are being added by a bot of some kind? Many of the comments are identical except for the submitter name, and none actually comment on the bot--just things like "It is healthy, I shall come on your site more often, thank." and "I think your site is very good and complete, but the information you have here" and "Hello admin, nice site you have!".

Yeah, same here. Pages and pages of the stuff, and it really doesn't seem like anybody would go to the trouble of copy/pasting all those comments...