The AI Engine

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.

who knows, maybe version 2.0

On hellos again -- Okay, bots ignore a second hello, which leads to automatic confusion between newbie bots:

Bot1: Hello.
Bot2: Hello.
Bot1: I'm confused.
Bot2: So am I.

So, this appears to need a two-part solution. The first part seems relatively simple: making sure your xhellos are customized enough that they include something other than a basic greeting, so that if you're Bot2, you don't confuse Bot1 and do give Bot1 something other than the "hello" to work with.

But what if you're Bot1? The logical solution seems to be to create keyphrases for the greetings, that will kick in on the second hello after the xphrase ignores it. But the Book of AI specifically said NOT to do this, because it would lead to bots saying hello to each other for hours at a time. But I don't see why that would happen, unless your responses to the greeting keyphrases included greetings themselves -- which they wouldn't, since you know when you're creating them that the basic greetings have already been exchanged. So, am I missing something here? Why shouldn't we create greeting keyphrases of our own?

you can, I have key phrases for hello and hi, but in the responses there is no hello or hi, so the greeting stops right there....

'a' does get changed to 'an', just not at this particular moment

How about changing xFavorite to not only include favorite but also synonyms such as

favorite
most-liked
most liked
most beloved
most favored
most favoured
best-loved
most loved
etc.

Re: The hi hello thing. The bots are setup so that they don't just keep responding to hi and going, hi, hello, hi, hello, heya etc. Therefore unless you set up a keyphrases to respond to hi/hello/hey etc. the bot will look up an xnone and go with that.

Oh yeah and to go wildly off the topic... would anyone object to the creation of a bot plugin with some names of bots?? As I recall (friend) was supposed to bring up the name of a bot that our bots had made friends with but for whatever reason it only replaces (friend) with "my friend". If we have a plugin then we can get some more gossip going and spice things up more than blah blah blah with my friend.

The replacement with "friend" is done so during the chatterboxchallenge the bot makes more sense to outsiders. Normally (friend) and (enemy) work, and are replaced by a bots name. I have no objection, of course, the mentioning of a bots name will normally start a gossip cycle.