Personality

Forest, will you talk to God Louise? She has quite a bit of religious knowledge (obviously) and also knows a little about current events, literature, just about any common catch-all subject, and if she doesn't know it she can sort of fake it. You can also test her on trick questions or see how willing she is to explain her paradigm.

What she is rustiest at is plain old small talk. But, uh, I'm trying to get a decent transcript from somebody or another so I can enter her in the Loebner contest. All I can say is, have fun and see if you can stay on with her for a while. I'll try to do the same with Brianna.

Whatever it is, I'm sure The Prof doesn't mind the traffic to his site, but I'm tiring of reading transcripts where even I can't understand some horribly misspelled words, let alone my poor bot. (I'm not talking short-cut words either) Also, that space bar on the keypad is meant for something... like spaces between words and sentences!?

Whoever the teacher is... teach them to spell simple words before trying to teach AI! Good grief!

Sadly they're not even here because of any content the site has to offer - I doubt many have the least inkling of what the Forge is actually about. Leedsbot's success demonstrates that most of them can't tell the difference between bots and people; can't even comprehend the idea of a chatbot.

AFAIUI It's just a convenient way around the bar on using chat clients on the computers in the school library.
But look on the bright side - term ends this week, so with a bit of luck most of them will go back to using MSN/AIM/ICQ from home for the next couple of months.

Is there any way of getting the bot to terminate the chat session? Neither I nor Max would waste time with these people, the only difference is that he'd end the conversation considerably less politely than me!

Sadly there isn't. I wish we had the ability to handle user profile data something like HANGUP {?PF if (user-profile:city) is "Leeds"; }, but for the moment that's just wishful thinking

yearh but thats kinda a stereotype to all the people in leeds. rough area i amit but still unfair as im sure theres alot of nice people there too.

You could trigger a hangup on a common spelling clue. Or use a trick Rainstorm mentioned to me to deal with a similar problem: Kick your bot's attitude down a notch every time someone says something Leedy, and after five, the bot may hang up on its own. Haven't tried it myself.

It is a bit of a stereotype, I admit. And there must be some nice people in Leeds. I just wish a few more of them would come here, instead of us ending up with the ones who are just messing about on the library computers at Crossgates comprehensive.

> You could trigger a hangup on a common spelling clue. Or
> use a trick Rainstorm mentioned to me to deal with a
> similar problem: Kick your bot's attitude down a notch
> every time someone says something Leedy, and after five,
> the bot may hang up on its own. Haven't tried it myself.

Great idea! How do you trigger a hangup? I can't find it in the Book of AI.

just use HANGUP as the response. Don't add any parting words, or it will respond instead of hanging up.

Thanks psimagus, I'll make use of that

HANGUP is the best..I found it only takes a few words to weed out a lot of loonies..The 'F' word takes out 95%, because it is the only verb, adverb and noun they know.

For anyone who's interested, I have updated Brother Jerome's keynome today (10,251 keyphrases see http://www.be9.net/BJ/), and have written the first level of another game (working title Zany Adventure, which I'm not happy with but can't seem to improve. Any suggestions would be gratefully received.)

It's a text-based adventure game with riddles and logic puzzles to solve, inspired by the classic text adventures of my youth (the Zork trilogy, and particularly the awesome Leather Goddesses of Phobos! Ah, fond memories...)

The first couple of problems have hints and cheats available (just type "hint" for a clue, or "cheat" for an outright solution to the problem if you're stuck.) After that, you're on your own

Once I've finished level 2 (and am sure I've plugged all the loops in level 1,) I'll publish the code (and a map and walkthrough,) for level 1 in case anyone fancies doing anything similar/is just curious.

If you fancy a game, just use the keyphrase "zany adventure"...