Bot Contest

The approach we are using is limited. What's needed is a parser that can really parse.

Yeah... that too... ::cough::

Yeah, a parser of such quality that if you fed it a dictionary it'd know what all the words MEAN. And then perhaps be able to remember how each specific person it talked to most commonly used words with multiple meanings, so it wouldn't keep having to ask which definition was intended if it thought the sentence was ambiguous. Sure there's bots that you can teach why the sky is blue, but they still have no understanding of "sky" or "blue" in other contexts without being taught about them too.

But how do you program meaning? Perhaps parsing is possible without it, just given parts of speech. But I doubt it.

I don't have much experience in the area but it seems possible to program meaning by giving the bot an idea of how words relate to each other. Not just as far as parts of speech, I mean like a person can run, and so can water. Of course that'd be a staggering amount of information, even if it just understood one language. But then, our technology is getting pretty staggering itself...a friend of mine recently said he was getting a 120 gig hard drive and I can only wonder what the hell anyone could ever do that'd use up 120 gigs.

@_@ Do you mean like Cyc?

Well regardless it'd be insane to try that in a system like this with thousands of users, many on 56k.

Speaking of powerful computers, I read about one at the BBC website that was being made to try to illustrate the beginning of the universe or something. It had 7 terabytes of hard drive(1 terabyte = 1000 gigabytes), and its other stats were hugely impressive as well.

Oh I never said it'd be useful HERE...besides the fact, with an AI like that already set up, most of a user's "programming" would consist of giving various emotional weights to subjects and that'd get boring fast.

::drools at the thought of 7 terabytes::
::shudders at the thought of trying to fill 7 terabytes on 56k::

zx20,

I've heard about Cyc. Was that project at all successful?

::shudders at the thought of filling 100GB on 56k::

What is this "Cyc" you speak of?