The AI Engine

i have arrived- You have an infinite range.
The Book of AI says you can set ranks at any number you want, but recommends (for your own sanity) that you stay between -50 and 50. Most of mine are in the 0-50 range. Hope this helps.

I just tested it by entering 999, and it cut back to 127. Numbers that large would probably override any preprocessing at all, but I wonder if two keyphrases set at that limit would be still be processed so that the longer phrase still gets chosen.

ezzer-- I know that there's an infinite range; it's just that I've already made ALL my keyphrases range between 1 and 10. It would take weeks to go back and rank them all using a new range... whereas, if I could use decimals, I could just start making new keyphrases with rankings like 8.3 and 2.6. I started doing that, but stopped when I noticed it was just rounding the number.

i have arrived:
I just use a range of 1-20, with the occasional -1

We can rank stuff in negative number??? Damn. And here I thought I could only use 0-50....

"I have arrived," you should re-do your rankings. Using only the numbers between 1 and 10 is going to cause problems for you, anyway, because phrases can get bonuses of more than 8 due to length and proximity to the beginning (or end?) of the sentence. I don't think you're going to be able to set up a foolproof ranking system unless you let yourself use larger numbers.

Just spend some time with an exported version of your bot's language center -- you can make all the changes at once. It won't take that long.

Isaacc-- is there any way I can immediately add say, 40 or so to every single rank? it would take so long to do it one by one... and there are lots of things to think about: like "there is *" should be lower than "there is not *", etc.

o.0 *feels stupid* I rarely use any rank over 5 and it works fine for me

if there is * already has a lower ranking than there is not *, there is not will be taken first because it's longer.

Basically, if you had the two with the same ranking, the longer one will be taken first.

really?! well, that's a relief... I've only been stressing my heiny over the rankings. I think it's because once, I rated "you are" and "you are not" the same, and said "you are not being nice" and my bot responded with one of the "you are" keyphrases

i have arrived- I have asked myself the same questions, and feel your pain. lol
Re-ranking is one of the more time-consuming of the tweaking processes. Every time I add a new keyphrase, I have to be conscious of every single word contained within, and check the ranks of every keyphrase that might be caught to make sure I don't throw the whole thing out of balance...At one point I decided that I should really have a big wad of my keyphrases ranked lower, and I still haven't finished changing them- that was weeks ago...lol I would LOVE if I could somehow select and add or subtract, as you suggested, a certain # from all of them at once...in the meantime, I've started in the a's, and I'm to about the i's...I'll probably finish changing them all by sometime next fall...

Well, if you're using a text-editing program to work off-line, you could probably have it find and change all instances of a given number... Every "[8," could become a "[16," every "[7," could become a "[14," and so on ... though you'd want to "babysit" that process so as not to change anything you didn't want altered.

I don't think simply adding the same number to everything would help, because it's the difference between the ranks that would cause one to be taken instead of another -- you need to create more space between them, not just move them all higher up the number line.