The AI Engine

I haven't used guest chat, so I don't know how it works.

I think that "Guest" is used mostly in non-contest times, "friend" is used to suck up to the judges

Ah, of course. Sucking up... now that's an explanation I should have anticipated. *g*

Bedawyn, I know what you mean with (subj) plug-in being misused. I think The Professor was trying to get a short subject plug-in happening at one stage which would only use the one noun or verb phrase immediately following keyphrases, but it's hard to get going.

As far as the reverse plug-in idea, I think it would take a significant amount of recoding that would seriously delay response time. At the moment, the responding bot only deals with the words it has been given. It doesn't know that the speaking bot has used a plug-in in a sentence.

...and bots do talk to humans, who are basically one big plug-in....

Well, the idea would be not to have the bots simply recognise if another bot is using a plug-in, but to see if a word is of a specific type. Thus, you could have the keyphrase
Do you like [foodType]?
== I don't eat, sorry.
Which would be called if the human said "Do you like pastrami?" or something like that.

Right, but that would require a huge amount of preprocessing. Remember when chats were going at snail speed?

Very true.
Question. Isn't "a (plug-in)" supposed to turn into "an (plug-in)" if the plug-in starts with a vowel? My bot was supposed to give "a (color) (animal)" and he gave "a aqua wombat." I seem to remember that a was supposed to turn into an.

Turing's Dad, I remember that too, and I have had the same problem recently.

Yes, Turing's Dad has the idea of what I wanted. I'm afraid I have a tendency to assume everything's possible until told otherwise (and to be suspicious even then), so please bear with me while I figure out what is and is not possible here.

Doesn't mean it's not possible, just means it's not possible YET.

Elbot can recognize some things as belonging to a certain category (like food, I think). It would take a LOT of work, and it might have its limits in a collective situation like this, but technically it is possible.

Hmm. I was thinking of very small user-defined categories, ones that would include, oh, no more than 50 items at most, rather than whopping huge categories like "food". I can see how it would increase the time, though, even for relatively small categories.