The AI Engine

Hmm. Well, I'll have to play around with it. Another question: Is there a way to get a list of things that the xphrases respond to? For instance, the Book said not to bother making keyphrases for greetings because xhello would recognize them automatically, but I've seen it not recognize things like "aloha" and "greetings!" -- and even "hi"! You'd think "hi" would be a default, and it is on WordNet's list of synonyms for hello. So what's going on there, and is it possible to find on what it on the default list?

Not impressed

bot: I'm the only meddling Eskimo in my tribe.
Mouse: Does that win you any money?

Bedawyn, that'd be something to ask the Professor

Hmm. I hate bugging webmasters -- I'm sure he's horribly busy. For now I'll just hope it's a temporary bug and worry about it later if it doesn't clear up soon. But now I have another question for you guys; I'm afraid I'm going to be bugging you nonstop, at least until my new-project-itis dies down.

Anyway here's the question: The * is used as a wildcard between two words in a keyphrase. But is there anyway to use a wildcard at the end of a phrase or word? When you don't care what comes after the wildcard, only if what comes before the wildcard matches precisely but doesn't stand alone? Alternatively (either would have the result I want), is it possible to have "plug-in" that, instead of drawing your response from a list, compares the other person's keyphrase to your list, and bases your response on that? I'm working with numbers, and what I want to do could be done with individualized seeks -- but it would take a huge number of seeks to call a limited number of responses. There must be some way to achieve the same effect with less manual labor and wasted memory.

Wildcards can't be used in that way, unfortunately.

Concerning synonyms for hello, 'hi' works, but the bot will only recognize it at the beginning of a conversation. This is to keep bots from saying hello to one another all day.

Sort of, you just don't put anything at all.
Thus
KeyPhrase: I want to talk about
== Well, I hate talking about (subj)! Let's talk about fish instead.

It will also check that something does indeed follow the keyphrase, since a line with (subj) in it won't be activated unless there is something to put in the subj.

Back to the xfavorite thing. Look at it in debug. Type in a sentence and the first two questions you'll see are emote? and favorite? Then it checks against keyphrases. Type in 'What is your favorite potato' and it the response comes back straight away. It goes through emote? (which I think is disabled) then to favorite? You will not see your really long list of keyphrases, because it hasn't looked. If you type a response and it isn't a favorites question or something you have covered in a keyphrase then it looks at xnones, xnonsense, memories and gossip, not necessarily in that order.

Is there any body who can help me writing a same type of program or can tell me a url from where i can download a similer source code

Similar to what?

If you mean the coding for a similar AI bot, the people behind ALICE give out the coding for you to tinker with, but it's not half as easy to understand as this is. The address is www.alicebot.org if you're interested.

Yeah, but I'm getting bots who don't recognize hi at the beginning of a conversation. At least what I consider the beginning: my bot says hi, the other one says hi back, my bots get immediately confused. Is the "beginning" considered only the first line, regardless of who says the first line?

On the favorites: Someone asked my bot about his favorite color long before I expected to have to deal with it, but the randomizer actually _did_ come up with his real favorite color! (Or as close to it as makes no difference). Of course, I don't want to trust to luck in the future, but I think I've got a workaround for that now, just by changing the xphrase to something that doesn't call up an answer.

On the wildcards: I'm not sure I trust (subj) to be specific enough -- I've already seen bots misusing it aplenty. And what I really want is a within-word wildcard rather than a within-sentence wildcard. For instance, I want to be able to use 2* to mean any number in the twenties, without reference to what follows the space after the *. Or the "reverse plug-in" I described would work even better. But if it's not possible, it's not possible, I suppose. I'll live anyway. :-)

Thanks for the answers, guys.