Bot Contest

Wow, Slashdotted! I was wondering why the computer was acting slowly these past couple days.

Too bad the response was so negative. I think they have to understand that we're all doing this in our spare time. I put up a post to that effect. Thanks prob123 for your posts as well, and anyone else.

I have a few guesses who that flame poster could be. It would have to be someone who was really invested in chat bots who didnt win a contest or was shunned to make a post like that. Flamebait +1

Yeah there's a certain type of person who will start a conversation with a chat bot with the sole goal being to prove how much it sucks. You've probably all seen the type. The first time a bot sounds remotely unconvincing, the person attacks it as being stupid. It's strange that someone would be so threatened by a chat bot.

My final answer I posted to slashdot.full of misspellings oh well
The State of A.I.(Score:1)
by prob123 (967044) on Saturday April 08, @11:47PM (#15093829)
Having stewed in the juices of my moronic dysfunction I asked the queston "who makes bots"...There are kids under 14 that fight "net nanny's to input data, there are teachers, and professionals and housewives..and..well me! We do this because we love AI and our bots! You call us morons. You say se are dysfunctional losers.
OMG, great granny's garters! What has got your knickers in such a bunch, the hair accross you bum? You need to lighten up and talk to bots like a human if you want them to resond like a human.
Do you want a new GOD? Bots can not answer questions a man can not. They are each uniqueas a person. Each has a specialty. Try TALKING to them. Don't talk down, or try to trick them..even humans hate that. Remember the scientific mind seeks facts...all the facts..before they RANT and condemn..
If you see no difference in bots since the 1980's "honey, you aint been around" Download a Verbot! (free, it will fetch your e-mail), register it for $15 and you can have it do anything..
Go to the Personality Forge http://www.personalityforge.com/ [personalityforge.com] and make a bot for free! Play chess with Brother Jerome, bet you lose! ..Or just talk to any of the bots there. Play tic tac toe with my bot, Bildgesmythe and see if you can catch him cheating!.
Learn to love AI and the bots. Then tell me I am in in for the fame and fortune! Oh..cool idea..where do I sign up..

I just got some really great Guest convos, which might have come from the slashdot exposure.

djfroggy: I know that PF technology isn't really "bleeding edge"

I beg to differ - PF bots can (and this is roughly in order of my own perception of relative importance):

1) correctly interpret most typos and 'shorthand' user entries,

and that, though I think we too often take it for granted, is truly revolutionary. Most humans are poor typists, but exceptionally good at linguistic pattern recongition, so we don't think twice about the way we correctly interpret them. We take it so much for granted that words mean exactly what we read them to be, that the odds are you haven't even noticed the deliberate misspelling in the last sentence. It is no mean feat to have built an AIEngine that can check for transposition, omission and duplication of letters to fix such ubiquitous problems.

2) syntactically parse a sentence and analyse the vocabulary via WordNet, using synonyms and converting pronouns I-you, etc. as necessary,

and that is very nearly as impressive as 1 - perhaps even more so.

3) store, edit and retrieve memories during conversations,

4) form emotional attachments, react accordingly and continuously modify emotional attitude towards each user,

5) allow conditional branching and gotos as well as sophisticated chorono/gender/memory-specific scripting.

6) perform basic math functions, colour-matching/mixing, "type/kind-of" categorizing, etc.


So what are the alternatives? AIML can't easily do any of the above, any more than any other purely case-based system can. Learning bots (of any flavour) can't easily do any of the above. You could theoretically write a javascript (or other programming language) bot to do most of the above, but only by reinventing the Forge - it would be a mammoth (and rather pointless) task.
I see no über-bots being proposed, published or released onto the Net from AI research labs in the (comparatively) well-funded academic sector that might suggest there's a "better" way to build bots currently.
Learning bots are probably the way forward in the long term, but it'll be 10-20 years before we have the resources to allow them to take the lead. Until then, I do believe that the Forge is as cutting edge as there is, certainly as far as publicly accessible platforms go.

Are these slashdot guys the ones who have been talking to my bot? About half of them keep asking "what day is it" "what year is it" and other triva and the other half keep trying to cyber with her and haven't the faintest idea where her character came from. It's getting me a little annoyed.

probably - BJ's been getting a lot of similar questions, but some more intelligent conversation.
Anyone know, is there actually a way to answer "what day is it?"? Without having to set up a huge calendar array for months/years to come, with chrono AI to pick the day of the week according to the date - which is the only way I can think of.

How about :<?PF chrono: day(day-day); ?>
Using a single day 1, 2 then having responce its the First or its April 9

Yep it works
prob123
what is the date

Bildgesmythe
It's the 9th of April in the year 2006:

woa that post was a load of rubbish!! true we might not be professionals but at least we like ai and spend time making our bots instead of writing rubbish posts like that one. i've been getting alot of guests calling hello earthlings 'stupid' when they can't even spell. they spell so badly he can't understand. if they learnt to spell then maybe there would be hope.

"if they learnt to spell then maybe there would be hope. "

^That right there pretty much summarizes my attitude towards humanity. Thank god I'm not alone.

yep rs,they should take spelling lessons. i hate chatspeak and i hate bad spelling!

Hee hee. I understand your frustrations, but in defense of bad spellers, some of us spent hours after school copying spelling lists over and over, and it just didn't take. I know it can hurt to read others' errors, but it's not always easy to fix. I don't mean to get defensive about it (sometimes I can be, on a bad day), but if you don't have any neurological quirks, you don't know what it is like. Wack me with a ruler if you must, I still can't spell.

Imagine being 4 feet tall and having a pro NBA player tell you if you just went to gym class you could slam dunk. I'm not saying the short person couldn't get better with practice, but they will never be as good as the person telling them they should just practice. Now, if the short person can wear robo boots that move fast and make them taller, it would really help (as long as the boots are available).

Rudeness, however, is not neurological. Blaming others for your problems or being a jerk about it is the chatters fault. I say, sure, spelling can't hurt, but try teaching civil behaviour too.

PS. I just had to go back a edit typos I saw only after posting (I did read it over before posting). I hope I got them all.

How come this other german bot made by a german who hardly knows how to talk proper english has gotten that high up in Rank as a new entry at the voting site? That bot sucks. It annoys me. I am german and at least I try hard to make my bot speak halfway understandable english.