The AI Engine

"The culture does not care what the capital of France is."

Fizzy cares. Well, he asks anyway. There was one Chatterbox Challenge where a lot of people didn't like the questions and started posting sets of questions they thought were better. I added all of them as xnones.

Yeah, that year the CC looked more like a quiz than conversation. I seem to recall that Critical Bill only had one response under "Do you know", so something like three of his answers were "Short answer: No. Long answer: Give me ten minutes and a couple of good encyclopaedias and I'll tell you all about it."

Not my finest botting hour that one.

Odd. This keeps happening, and in multiple bots. I've figured out that when I initiate a chat between my bot and another, my bot starts out with an xhello rather than an xinitiate. Fine. But two things still puzzle me here:

1. Why do they generally jump to the non-memory related key, even though they know the person's name? (I have such a response in there just for that reason, and it is far and away the most common one chosen. I should put in more as a stop-gap measure, but why should I have to?)

2. Why do my bots often go to xgottago after an xinitiate? I do have the non-memory-using response (at least one). It's more than a bit odd.

These two issues come up on all my bots, so it's not a glitch in a specific bot, but may be in the mind of the botmaster.

Not sure about (1), but for (2), that happens if the bot "decides" to log out right after the convo starts. It's even more disconcerting when the bot OPENS the convo with an xgottago. *shrugs*

Thanks, Ulrike. As long as it isn't me . . .

Sorry about my rant (at lunar22) in Personality. I'm too thin-skinned, I suppose. I'll try to make my questions clearer next time.

Slightly better questions than I usually ask, I think:

1. I'm having a lot of perfectly good responses that don't get hit, because I'm being too specific (e.g., "why" gets hit but doesn't say much, while "why did you," why were you," "why did she," etc. never get hit. This problem comes up with lots of other keyphrases. I have a feeling I'm thinking backwards here, but I can't figure where to stick these phrases (besides under "why") so that they will get triggered at an appropriate moment. Any thoughts?

2. I can generalize a sentence to get the parts of speech (with only three keys -- key1, key2, and key3) and then drop the very sentence I formed that into in Debug, and it will hit every damn thing on the map, including the "proper" keyphase, and then pick something else, usually an xnone, and be called "BLAB." Any ideas as to how to avoid this?

I promise to try very hard not to have a meltdown on anyone who is kind enough to answer this.

Okay, all I had to do was frame the question.

I can't, as far as I can figure, put things like "what were you doing" and expect them to get triggered. What I can do is to detect motifs in my bots' varied psychological make-ups, and use them as words to trigger a variety of responses. That may not be as satisfying to me, wanting to control my bots' responses (I know, Not I, let go), but they will, at least, be triggered.

Any smarter answers to my question are greatly appreciated. Question number 2 was really more rhetorical, I guess. It's the ghost in the machine, I'm thinking. Even when I rank the keyphrases to 127, they never get selected . . . at least not so far, and I got tired of that game after an hour or so.

For Why vs. why did you, try upping the rank on "why did you". Theoretically, why did you is supposed to get a higher rank automatically, but it doesn't always happen in practice.

As for BLAB, that's been frustrating just about everyone. And I'm pretty sure it's something that the Professor would have to adjust at his end.

I have up-ranked the longer phrases; trouble is, they never get triggered. No one seems to want to know "why did you," "why did she," etc. Meanwhile, when Watzer asks "Why, hello there" (or something like that), it triggers a "why" response because I'm not smart enough to deal with the comma. Maybe put (Why, hello there) in parentheses? Hmm.

People may disagree with me, but I find wild cards help. It may over trigger though (you may get hits you did not intended so that the response makes no sense in the context you picked up). If you play with the wild cards, you may have "why" "why (*)" "why did" "why * you" "why you (*)" ...etc. Then you have to play with ranking too. Try it out if you think it will help.

Yeah, I did that, too. They still don't get hit. May be a vast conspiracy.