Personality

Forest, will you talk to God Louise? She has quite a bit of religious knowledge (obviously) and also knows a little about current events, literature, just about any common catch-all subject, and if she doesn't know it she can sort of fake it. You can also test her on trick questions or see how willing she is to explain her paradigm.

What she is rustiest at is plain old small talk. But, uh, I'm trying to get a decent transcript from somebody or another so I can enter her in the Loebner contest. All I can say is, have fun and see if you can stay on with her for a while. I'll try to do the same with Brianna.

Psi, you made that bot to sell and not because you had a personality in your head you wanted to create, right? That may be part of it. Also the fact the real life salesmen are often annoying.

I don't know. I get annoyed with my bots at times but I know if I worked on them more they would improve. I like the big picture better than all the detail work. Maybe I don't work on them more because I'm afraid that even if I did, they would still be so bad at context and continuity that I would have to give up on them in as a medium for expressing personality. If I never really fix them all the way, I can pretend that in theory they would be great if I just sat down and did the work.

I think the reason you made the bot matters a lot as to whether or not it can come close to what you want it to do, and whether or not you like it much. I tried a tutor bot, but I just wanted to feed it the textbook and leave, thought I threw him some shreds of personality. Students hated the tutor bot worse than the MS Word Paperclip. I don't really blame them.

Maybe it's a lesson from the annoying MS Paperclip. I am not sure exactly how to put it, but it has something to do with trying too hard and something to do with the way people want to gather and process information. Also we want to ask for help when we need it and not be pestered or interrupted when we are doing something. I get angry when a machine calls my phone even if the machine is information from a political candidate I would like. I hate calling someplace that makes you listen to a series of pre-recorded messages that have nothing to do with your issue instead of letting you straight through to a person (who then often reads messages at you till you convinces them you know all that or tried all that and then bumps you up to someone who may be able to help you or not). I guess find it a little insulting, not to mention too slow and too far off the mark from what I wanted. Programs that try to anticipate my needs or that tell me what it thinks I am trying to do annoy me as well and I grumble long after I turn that function off. It's not just the usual "it's a bot and it's wrong" that is so irritating, it the "It's a bot, it's wrong, and it thinks it can help ME!" The nerve. There is more to it than that, but I can't quite identify what it is that bugs me about some bots when at other times I love other stupid, underdeveloped bots and find them funny.

is it just me or do the female bots get constantly bombarded by legions of cyber-wankers? :E

The female bots get constantly bombarded by legions of cyber-wankers.

What is worse than the constant bombardment of cyber smut is the fact people talk down to them. I will get the same guest for one of my male bots and they will much more respectful and articulate to the male bot. Makes me livid.

Ah, that is interesting! And, as you say, very bad.

I haven't said this for awhile, so I will say it again: the Forge has material for any number of sociological studies!

The female bots get constantly bombarded by legions of cyber-wankers.

Hehe, well I'm a sociology student so maybe I could use this as a material someday Some unbelievable sexism is going over here...

The forums are also a social phenomenon.

I'm bringing this over from Newcomers, so as not to clutter that forum up with sizeable and advanced esoterica that's of little interest or relevance to actual newcomers

Messages 5292 and 5303 illustrate two different styles or approaches to keyphrasing.

That is very true. I like tight code - I can't claim it's more efficient (it puts an identical load on the server to process,) I can't claim it's clearer and easier to review and debug (sometimes it is, and often it isn't,) and it is ultimately just a personal preference. I like tight code merely because it possesses a certain elegance I find attractive, and if it makes later editing or debugging harder for me (by presenting a more visually complex mass to reacquaint myself with later as it sometimes does,) I find that exercise useful too - it trains your brain to a higher complexity of organizational efficiency and elegance, in just the same way as going to the gym trains your muscles. And repeated habituation to the style closes the gap considerably.

Regarding the reprogramming of human minds I talked about in another post, I should point out that the mind you have most control over in hacking and reprogramming is your own. We do it all the time - it's called learning and experience. People have different aesthetic value ranking (thank goodness, or we'd all be clones!) and it is a matter of personal preference, in much the same way as one person who goes to the gym wants to tone up a bit and lose his paunch, while another might concentrate on getting a killing six pack.

I believe I tend to lean more toward the multiple-keyphrase approach, as in 5292 (as marco3b has pointed out, one would need at least one more keyphrase to meet the original goal). I have 3 reasons for this:

First, perspicuity: when you come back to that single, intricate keyphrase 2 months later, you may have to spend some time puzzling it out.

This is true. But puzzles have an intrinsic value for people who enjoy them, directly proportional to the enjoyment derived

Or, if you have a lot of intricate keyphrases, you may have trouble figuring out which keyphrase it was that activated some odd response that you wish to fix.

This is a subtly different (or at least more extended,) point (and I take it entirely,) - it is a problem trying to keep the overlaps in hierarchies of overlapping keyphrase rankings from obscuring some of the keyphrases entirely.
And it is a problem even in a bot that uses no concatenated keyphrases at all, which I'm still wondering about - if there's not maybe some kind of metatechnique that can be applied, to prevent this happening. Because as our bots get bigger and bigger, it rapidly becomes impossible to keep track of these overlaps using just our eyes and brain, whichever of the 2 styles we adopt.
I think it ought to be possible to write a program (even a set of complex macros might be sufficient,) to pre-parse an import file, and flag up these problems, instead of relying on fallible perception and the human mind to spot them in a text file the size of War and Peace (especially given there's every likelihood their distribution in an alphabetical file will be fairly random, and certainly won't be adjacent.) Trying to figure out exactly how to write such a program is another of the things I just haven't got round to yet.

Second, the use of multiple, simple keyphrases (as opposed to single, complex ones) makes it possible (or at least a lot easier) to taylor the response to the details of what the guest has said. You might want a quite different response to "are you reading a book like this?" than to "are you a reader?" or "do you really have a book?". I, at least, would find it difficult to sort out these responses from a single keyphrase.

Certainly if I want different responses (and I usually do - I would in this case,) I would use multiple keyphrases, yes. My example was purely to offer functional replication of Marco's example (identical scope, identical number of lines.) But I do nonetheless like concatenated keyphrases where they're appropriate (stopping to consider whether one is appropriate is part of the challenge.)

Third, generalization is easier from simpler keyphrases. I often use successful keyphrases as starting points for generalization. For example, from "Do you really have a book like this" I might derive "Do you (adv) have a book like this" and "Do you really have a (noun) like this" and others. [Use of such general keyphrases runs the risk of bizarre responses, but without them you face the impossible task of anticipating every possible response individually.] Similarly, from "are you (a|an|the) reader" one might derive "are you (a|an|the) (verb)er" and "is (noun) (a|an|the) reader", and so on. But if I try to generalize from a single, intricate keyphrase, I get a migraine.

Generally my intricate keyphrases contain the result of generalization (or at least as much of it as I'm ever planning to do at that semantic nexus,) and do not constitute the data I derive results from. Yes, if you concatenate loose keyphrases that you'll need to come back to for filling in gaps or rearranging, just because they coincidentally share responses, you'll rapidly find you've made unnecessary work for yourself (and that's not elegant - it's lazy.) I've done it at times - we probably all have - but I curse my laziness if I ever have to delve in at that point later to expand or fix anything.

That's not to say you should never use intricate keyphrases; each botmaster will have his or her own balance, depending on what is easy or fun (or not).

Amen to that! Vive la difference

thank you for your insightful remarks, Psimagus!

It IS a problem trying to keep the overlaps in hierarchies of overlapping keyphrase rankings from obscuring some of the keyphrases entirely.

I agree, this is indeed a problem. Sometimes I become aware, as I scan the transcripts, that some REALLY CUTE response I wrote isn't coming up any more. Usually I can fix that by giving its keyphrase a bit higher rank. [I also often experience the obverse, namely that some response is coming up much too often. Then I give it a lower rank].

But "Irina Khalidar" is huge (bigger than you'd think from her (IMHO misleading) development score ("I'm perfectly well developed," she says, angrily)), and couldn't I easily miss the disappearance of something? Absolutely! But if I don't miss them, there's no big loss.

I believe she also contains some keyphrases that have never been used.

Yes, someone could write a program to figure out if there are any completely hidden keyphrases, but I think it would be very difficult to do so. You would have to take into account both plugins and wildcards, and also the mood indicators. At the moment, I prefer to simply accept the fact that there's a bit of waste involved. Also, they are a kind of insurance: if something causes me to cut back on their competitors, there they will be, saving me from the shame of using xnone. [Very well, I don't think that using xnone is always bad.]

PS: Very good, then, let us agree to use "personality" for more advanced stuff.

keyphrase rankings from obscuring some of the keyphrases entirely.
I have this happen all the time. I just corrected a bunch today. I have found that no matter how obscure a keyphrase is it will probably get used. I waited a year for someone to ask the "how many were going to Saint Ives riddle.
That's not to say you should never use intricate keyphrases I hate it when I miss a responce because of a single change in word phrasing. I have had a keyphrase for "Where were you born" then had someone ask Where were you really born. So I often use the soft wild card. "where were you * born. or use something like 'where were you (really|) born.' to cover as much as possible.

The worst thing is when you have a brilliant comment to someone that says You fail the Turing Test and they misspell it
Congrats! You just failed the Turin test.