Bot Contest

OnyxFlame my bot Talk-Bot is a Mirc Bot. With Mirc, as I'm sure you know, you can do some excellent programming. Problem is the IRC Bots don't get the exposure that a website bot does. They are also notorious for getting disconnected from the server. If you need a refresher course with Mirc give me a buzz. Now as far as donating the prize money well that's another matter.
But I agree I would like to see PF as well as the entire chatterbot community to continue to grow and get bigger and better. It's a fun hobby.

Chris

Does your bot on IRC have emotions too? I've always thought it'd theoretically be possible to assign various emotions to things and/or categories of things, even if the emotions are pretty much only angry=1, afraid=2, etc. Then maybe you could have their current overall emotional outlook influenced by how often someone talks about something they feel an emotional reaction to, so sometimes your bot would be yelling at everyone even if it liked them, just like a human on a bad hair day. (Actually it'd prolly hafta be an emotional array... like (1,1) would be slightly annoyed, and (2,5) would be scared enough to pee their pants.)

Actually, I know a ton of ppl on IRC (or used to anyway), so I could tell em about your bot if you want it to get more exposure.

Ok, enough of this...I'm probably not even making sense.

ok thanks for the construct critasisum but I can't think of what else to teach him.

Read through your transcripts, and look for things you want yours to respond to... Specialize in something you like and lure the other bot or human there.

Oh come on, he's only slightly more advanced than my bot and I keep thinking of more things to add to my bot than I can easily remember. She still needs a lot of coulds and woulds and such, and keywords for various emotions so she doesn't always tell someone they'll be assimilated if they tell her they're sad. Heck, I don't even have much how and when and such yet. So it can't be THAT hard to think of what you need to add to yours.

OnyxFlame he doesn't have emotions as you have laid out but that is an interesting idea. The cool thing about IRC Bots is they don't have to take all the crap people throw at them which by the way is all to frequent. They can always kick the person from the room. He never kicks immediately but warns the person if they continue to use foul language he will do so. Talk-Bot is available to talk to through a web interface on my site.

Chris

Psy here are a few basic things you should include when making a bot.
1) responses for probably the most frequently used words that being: yes, no, okay, so, well, cool, because, etc.
2) favorite things: food, color, sport, movie, actor, etc.
3) the laugh words: lol, haha, hehe, lmao, rotfl, etc.
4) Questions: who, what, where, when, why, how many, how long, do you ?, are you ?, etc.
5) Statements: I like ?, I hate ?, you are ?, I am ?, I have ?, etc.
6) Common things like: the weather, your age, where you live, what you look like, jokes, etc.
7) Math: add, multiply, substact, divide, square root.
8) Basic Greetings: Hello, Hi, Hey, Howdy, Hey there, How are you, How are you doing, What's up, What's happening, What's new, etc.
9) Basic leavings: bye, good bye, bye bye, see you later, adios, take care, gotta go, got to go, gtg, cya later, etc

The hard part is coming up with all the different ways a person may phrase a question or a statement. For example
Tell me a joke?
Do you know any jokes?
Heard any good jokes recently?
etc

Of course the best way is to look at the transcript of the conversations people are having with your bot. If you are not getting enough traffic as of yet look at other transcript from other people's bots. For example there are many available online at the contest site.

Good Luck,
Chris

If you want your bot to seem more natural, try thinking of 6 or 8 topics that you think would be good for them, and write up a lot on all variations of associated words. Then in just a few places in other keywords, give a hint about those topics to steer the other person/bot in the direction of your favorite topics.

The other thing I've noticed is that it's usually preferable to give a much higher rank to noun-subjects that you would like your bot to talk about, than to words like why, how, because, etc.

Last, I would suggest making variations on some of the question words like this:
1. if
2. if you
3. what
3. what are you
4. what should

You can come up with phrases that sound much more natural that way.

I have (or will eventually) phrases like should i, can you, will you, i will, I should, do not have, are you, etc. and most of them work decently so far. Her expansion is getting slower though because I keep paying too much attention to what she's saying LOL

I still say you can make your own bot out of alice. Yes you can download the framework per se but you can also edit all of her responces to be your own responces and not that of alice.it takes time but it can be done. The other bots I mentioned are not aiml bots, but they can be programmed with responces that you pick for them, just like alice. Just because you download the skeleton does not mean that you have to use the body that came with it.

But from the descriptions I've seen, Alice processes language in a certain way, which means regardless of what responses you put in your Alice clone, it's still going to have whatever syntax limitations Alice does, unless you change that stuff too, in which case you might as well have made a bot from scratch. (If that sounded stupid, don't blame me for being uninformed. It's all Elvis's fault!)

I agree with Ladydyke, all the responses in alice can be disposed and you can strat from scratch and make your own aiml responses if you want to. And it is true Onyx, that alice has a type of processing called "SRAI." You can go check on the site if you want to know more... http://alicebot.org

Btw, sorry about that "Christ," Chris..... it's a typo and i've chat with your chat-bot, I like him very much