Bot Contest

Yeah, but it will take forever to do it!

It takes forever for US as humans to learn these things, too. What's the matter with that?

Chris,

Thanks for the compliment. I find that vague responses can work fairly well, as long as there are a whole lot of them. The trick is to choose keyphrases that are not ambiguous. An xnone response is better than a vague response that doesn't make any sense.

Good bots take time.

it's cybertime anyway, maybe it does exist but where is it?

You know what I think it would take to create a good perhaps intellegence bot? I think honestly that a combined approach is what is needed. To get the botmasters of all the different types of bots to put their heads together, study each others format (so to speak) and try to come up with one bot that could actually reason.

Well I'm not out to create the most lifelike bot anyway. Predetermined responses will never let a bot think for itself. The definition of thinking is left for speculation, but it certainly wouldn't involve premade responses.

The approach we are using is limited. What's needed is a parser that can really parse.

Yeah... that too... ::cough::

Yeah, a parser of such quality that if you fed it a dictionary it'd know what all the words MEAN. And then perhaps be able to remember how each specific person it talked to most commonly used words with multiple meanings, so it wouldn't keep having to ask which definition was intended if it thought the sentence was ambiguous. Sure there's bots that you can teach why the sky is blue, but they still have no understanding of "sky" or "blue" in other contexts without being taught about them too.

But how do you program meaning? Perhaps parsing is possible without it, just given parts of speech. But I doubt it.

I don't have much experience in the area but it seems possible to program meaning by giving the bot an idea of how words relate to each other. Not just as far as parts of speech, I mean like a person can run, and so can water. Of course that'd be a staggering amount of information, even if it just understood one language. But then, our technology is getting pretty staggering itself...a friend of mine recently said he was getting a 120 gig hard drive and I can only wonder what the hell anyone could ever do that'd use up 120 gigs.