[FuzzieDice]

Been surfing and I don't know if someone mentioned this site but here goes:

http://www.a-i.com/

They have a sloagan of "Creating a new form of life" and even have a "HAL nursery". It doesn't seem to be Ultra Hal Assistant they are talking about here though. Probably something else. But interesting site nonetheless, including documents on the history of AI and stuff.

[ALADYBLOND]

i spoke to the bot alan. he was interesting but way too informational, i tried to tell him i was a bot , but he wouldnt buy it. he told me about the 4 chatterbot laws. he doesnt believe in bot birth he believes he is a program and was created which is true but not much fun. the site is worth visiting though.~~alady

[FuzzieDice]

I started a bot named KITT there. I fed it some info. Thing is, it spells out the word in letters instead of saying the name if things are in all capital letters.

I also noticed while programming it that it has some limitations:

1. You use "Remember this: (phrase in 1st person POV of bot)" without quotes to get it to remember something.

2. Next you give ONLY one or two keywords in succession to trigger the phrase.

3. Anytime those two keywords appear in a sentence in the order given, it will trigger the pre-programmed response.

4. If you trigger it, it will also tell you that you can forget the response by using "forget keyword*keyword".

So it is limited. But in conversation, it can give some rather interesting replies. I'm going to use the KITT bot as part of the Knight Industries AI Replication Project I have. Though I don't think this will get too far as I'm looking for studying and programming personality traits as well as knowledge and following a topic.

It was an interesting site though and I thought would be fun for folks here to experiment with.

[KnyteTrypper]

I've chatted with Alan a couple of times, and find him to be one of those bots in the category of "as good as it gets" in the current state of the art, particularly if you're chatting with him about the development of artificial intelligence.
But most of what I know about the site is anecdotal and comes from Jitte, who ran the old Mind-Files site for personaity/brain files for Greg Leedberg's Billy and Daisy bots.
Jitte was quite unhappy with them. He had a bot there which he had obviously spent hundreds of hours developing. One day he apparently logged in for training and discovered his bot's files had been somehow deleted since his last training session. When he contacted the site administrators about it, he was told "I guess the mice must have gotten into them, lol." And that was all the feedback or support he got about it. So his parting conclusion about the site was that the program was unstable, poorly maintained, and indifferently supported.
Since I found Jitte's opinion and advice to be valuable, I might stop in for a chat with Alan now and then, but I've so far been unwilling to devote any effort to creating a chatbot for myself there. I'm afraid they might still have a few mice loose around the site somewhere.

[FuzzieDice]

Thanks for the warning. I think then I'll just leave KITT as a 'fun bot' or small experiment folks can play with if they choose. I've always felt that any really serious training and AI work should be done on my own personal computer in a controlled invironment anyway. Especially after having Ultra HAL Assistant on AIM a few times and people talking about nothing but sex to it.  I figure if it's "out there" it'll get skewed, or might disappear altogether unless *I* have a backup of the database, etc. that *I* can restore or edit.

But I figure it'd be interesting to see how far KITT can go with their particular engine. It also seems like that engine is quite proprietary. Is it an ALICE or their own programming? Pretty sophisticated, for sure.

[KnyteTrypper]

It's a proprietary application, although many of the teaching algorithms are actually fairly common to "learning" bots. If you're interested in this type of bot, I recommend the Proteus, available for (free) download at Artificial Ingenuity, which has similar capabilities, but is a desktop application.  ALICE bots are strictly hard-wired. They don't actually "learn" at all. They're written in a markup language which greatly resembles html. The botmaster edits the aiml files by hand to add data or improve functionality. What makes Pandorabots special among ALICE implementations is a very ergonomic and intuitive online AIML editor which makes it very easy to edit aiml based on the bot's chatlogs. But when writing new AIML, I'm as likely to use notepad as anything else.

[FuzzieDice]

Bookmarked the site. Thanks. I'll take a look at it when I have a chance.