Bot Contest

I've been having a lot of long chats with Brianna today and yesterday show up in my transcript. They have been questions such as:
Guest: I'm tired. What should I do?
and
Guest: My name is Bryan. If I come back on in a minute will you remember that?
and then actually reasking the name.

Which brings me up to my question: Prof, is it possible for the Bots to remember a name rather that just call them 'Guest'. It would help out a lot!

how would it remember which guest is which, apart from storing IP lists?

That would be difficult to do.. I suppose cookies could work. But at best it would be computer-specific, and not user-specific. And that's probably good enough.

What about just for the one conversation?

cookies are fine until you run up against a firewall.

Depends how touchy the firewall... Most are ok.

true unless you are a total idiot concerning firewalls, (anyone care to hold up their hand as I raise mine in the air) then you could end up blocking the cookie and in some cases the site itself.

Aha, I understand. Points at NotKirby to get him to raise his hand.

You'd have to write the cookie catching code to allow for people who disable their cookies

IE can set to automatically reject all cookies you know.

Yep

That'll prevent any user session, though, so you really need cookies turned on to use this site. IE can also have cookies site-specific.

I've created the interface for Loebner, and tweaked the system so that responses are coming in 5 seconds or less. This is going to be my goal in all future improvements. If it kicks it over 5 seconds per response, then I'll do without.