Newcomers

hmm - I'm surprised. Maybe it's until the next guest comes along with a different IP?

I just went through the Chatterbox Challenge link and same thing

Guest167: hi remember me
Bildgesmythe: Glad to see you problem. I am so glad you stopped by.
Guest167: how old am I
Bildgesmythe: You were born in, and you don't know how old you are?.... Just about 222

Maybe it lasts untill the next three chatters knock it off the last three guest chat list?

The ratings are a puzzle. I have two bots with almost excatly the same number of lines, one is rated Dev:184 and the other is rated Dev:80. And the lower rated one has more AI, more levels of Seek, and some very complex (comparatively) coding. So why is the "smart" one rated half the other?

(to psimagus)
in raw mode:
[b][o]([t]+)[o][m] [l][e][f][t] (re)
[b][o]([t]+)[o][m] [r][i][g][h][t] (re)
[b][o]([t]+)[o][m] [m][i]([d]+)[l][e] (re)
----------------------------------
YES! It worked! Holy crap that was complicated! For future reference, that seems to be the only way to override xinsult with a seek. This needs to be published somewhere on the site for other people who run into this problem.

It's a useful regex blunderbuss approach when the AI Engine won't behave. But they can get a LOT more complicated than that, believe me!

MickMcA: The 'dev' level doesn't just reflect the number of lines in your bot, and some things (such as adding a keyphrase with only one response) can actually LOWER your dev level. The exact formula is known only to the Prof.

That's a myth, easily verifiable. What happens when you add a keyphrase with only one response is that it'll only add a small fraction of a point to the Development score. What'll lower it is AI scripts and possibly seeks (I haven't been able to nail down whether the seeks do it).

I suspect it has something to do with these features being newer additions to the engine (well, relatively newer) and maybe the Dev score wasn't considered at the time.

Except for seeks with only one response, I've found that AIScript and Seeks raise the development. Perhaps there's an element of randomness in the Professor's secret formula.

The puzzle is worse than I expected.

Let me offer a possiblity to consider. There are two ways to program a bot, what I call brute force (anticipate every KeyPhrase, at its most "primitive") and what I would call "elegant" (guess where my sympathies lie...), which attempts to build a rule that captures as many true positives as possible. Is it possible that the Dev score is weighted toward brute force?

Just thinking out loud.
M
BTW: Pocque has been mainly built by brute force, and my other bot, with the same number of lines, is heavily weighted the other way, but rated at 1/3 of Pocque's "development."

Two questions:

1. Is there some way to turn off the "volunteer" responses? I have a character who is explicitly primed [50,0] to say what their favorite movie is. Instead, I get random answers that are totally out of character, courtesy of some response data in the background. I finally got the scripted response by jacking the Rating up to 150.

2. [related] Where do the bizarre substitutions come from? I asked a character if they had read For Whom the Bell Tolls, and they responded, "No. Is it fun to victimize For Whom the Bell Tolls?" What?? I understand that the bots need to have access to more than just our responses, to seem spontaneous, but what's the point of building a bot around a character if the engine is going to ignore the "in character" stuff that's sitting there waiting to be used?

I have had this problem with my "perv trap" as well, and I can't seem to defeat it. With a hundred traps set up, the bot still responds to sexual invitations with comments like, "That would be a fun way to spend the weekend," etc., which is not only totally out of character, but gives the sex boy a taste of exactly what he wanted.

well, you * read * For Whom the Bell Tolls rank=30 works fine for me. No need for regexes, raw mode or blunderbusses.

I found one cause for the (read=victimize) problem. I had used this approach (tildes are tabs):
Do you like to (verb)?
-(verb)? I don't know how to (verb).

I thought that would repeat the identifed verb. Apparently it substitutes random verbs instead. Revising as
~(key1)? I don't know how to (key1).