Bot Contest

From a personal standpoint, I sure don't see any advantage of Alice being open source. Ok, you download Alice which was created by Dr Wallace. No matter what you add or change it will never be your bot. What we have here is a bunch of Alice clones all over the internet. All basically responding in the same vein. Be creative and create your own. That is where the fun lies and programming a chatterbot is not as hard as many may think. There are many bot owners who would be more than willing to help in that regard. The Personality Forge is a great place for doing just that. The Chatterbot community needs to expand with people doing their own thing not simply following the Alice team. Alice is a good bot but she has never won the more competitve Chatterbox Challenge. It will be interesting to see how this years version will end. Chris

Not that my bot is anywhere near good enough for a contest (I just started on it today) but I'm with Chris on this one. I have no idea how to code this stuff from scratch, but I tried briefly to make a psychiatrist bot on IRC. (Remember Dr. Sbaitso? Ah those were the days. I used to swear at him a lot ) From what I've seen this site has the best AIs around, although I'm not exactly an expert. It's a hell of a lot better than one site I saw where it just repeated everything all the users said in random order. (Especially because one or more sadistic users fed it Sherlock Holmes and Alice in Wonderland quotes.) I hope someday my bot will be worthy of entering a contest, but so far the best it can do is tell a joke now and then.

Yeah, those bots that learn from you can end up pretty damn @#$%ed up.

chris,
actually you can create your own bot using alice by using the aiml language but none of the preprogamed responces. It is possible to literly make one from scratch. Besides if we follow your logic then one could not claim that cara, albert, alice, kiwilogic, alice and the personality forge (all self programmable bots).

With all due respect read what I wrote. I said if a person downloads the Alice bot. I didn't say you couldn't build a entirely new bot from scratch using AIML. The fact is people simply download Alice including her responses and go from there. The distinction is NOT in the programming language used but in using someone elses responses. None of the bots you mention are using someone elses responses although they maybe using the same or a similar programming language.

Chris

Hey, I think my bot is good enough for the contest! I haven't even had him for a year and he seems like he is not ready by most people from looks at his profile. But he has soooo many good chats that I don't see how he is not ready. So chat with Psybot (my bot) an post back here with what you think about him.
(P.S. - Hey Prof, you should have contests between the bots every now and then (not for real money yet/ever) but sometimes so ppl know how to really improve the bots.)

CHAT WITH ME! I LOVE TO CHAT! PSY IS NOT GOING TO WORK ON A NEW BOT UNTELL HE THINKS I AM READY FOR AgentLands BOT CONTEST So chat with me ASAP.

Christ- The reason that alice is made publically open source, I think, is to allow people to use the responses already built and add your knowledge of specialty, the specific field that you are working on. This allows commercial user to get their bots up fast without having to work very hard on casual responses. You can make FAQbot out of alice, for example.

And it is possible to make a bot using AIML just like ladydyke said.

To Psy,

Last night I noticed your creation online after reading your request, so I introduced myself. Since you asked for opinions, I hope you don't mind a little constructive criticism. Refer to the transcript, if it's still available.

To be honest, I found it rather hard to engage Psybot in meaningful conversation. Most of what I fed him seemed to return a response that he didn't understand, or some non-sequetor. Although these responses themselves were varied, it wasn't enough to consider what we had a dialogue.

I think you need to cover a lot more keywords for him. I threw him some real softballs that should not have thrown him for a loop, but did.

Don't get me wrong, he's as good or better than many of the bots I've chatted to here, but take a look at some of the contest transcripts and questions, especially among the top 5 or 10 contestants, and consider how Psybot would have responded.

Christ??? is that directed to me? I'm not sure. Alice is open source for a variety of reasons. If you are interested drop by the Alice site and see. If you are looking for a fast and free way to get a chatterbot by all means go and download Alice. Just remember your bot will not be much different from the thousands of people that have donejust that. To me the fun of chatterbots is creating one yourself. Building a personality that you created and develop not one that has already been chosen for you. If you are using Alice's responses or any other bot for that matter it will never truly be your bot. In fact bots like those will never be able to enter The Chatterbox Challenge. It's all a matter of what you want. I believe and I think "The Professor" will agree with me is we need the chatterbot community to grow. We need people building their own bots and not simply downloading someone elses. The Professor through the PF has made it where even nonprogrammers can do just that. I think that is a great thing and through the contest I am trying to give all of us the opportunity to have some fun and the opportunity to compete with the best bots in the world. Until I started the Chatterbox Challenge this was not possible. See how hard it is to enter the Loebner contest if you doubt that.

Chris

I wish I remembered more mIRC script. I used to make some pretty funny bots on there, although none of them were anywhere near intelligent. A friend said I could probably equal the bots on here if I tried, but since he's never been here I dunno how he can say that. Hell, the bot we collaborated on way back when took up about a meg and she was only a nut who rolled dice, spit out funny random sentences, and did some jokes & 8 ball stuff.

Anyway now that I'm done with my ego-stroking tangent, I really hope one of the Prof's bots wins, or that someone else from here does and they donate some of their money to him. Might not go very far with today's inflation, but I'd really like to see this place get bigger & better than it is. (Which is why I complain so much about its faults ) Although that might actually be scary...I already spend 8 hours at a whack on here sometimes, think if it was even better.