[kaat]

Hello All,

I'm beginning a project that will be a web-based chat room, but with lots of AI continuously acting on user posts. I know that doesn't sound new, but I have some ideas about the intelligent connecting and filtering of users and posts. The system is also to learn, when a user declares it's actions have been useful, or not.

Anyway, given that I haven't committed to any platforms yet, I'm wondering about this: How best to balance a high-traffic, but simple chat front-end with all the 'background' AI processing that must occur?

My web experience has been with PHP/MySQL. It seems clear that this would not provide the most efficient system here. Any thoughts on better suited approaches? I do have access to programmers of most kinds

One approach I've been thinking of is to create a totally stripped-down custom engine to run server-side, handling the AI and database functions. Do people do this? Does it sound like "you have no idea how much work that would be"?

Thanks.

P.S.: This forum theme, all black and gray, looks cool, but is hard to work with - especially form fields.

[Art]

Regarding the theme color, you can go to your user PROFILE section and at the top of that window, select CHANGE.

You might like the SMF Default one better. I use the Black22 one. You should see 5 choices.

[kaat]

Thanks Art!

[squarebear]

Regarding the theme color, you can go to your user PROFILE section and at the top of that window, select CHANGE.

You might like the SMF Default one better. I use the Black22 one. You should see 5 choices.

Now you tell me! I've been straining my eyes for months with the default colours!

[Freddy]

Lucky me I have a high contrast monitor.    But yeah I provided other themes in case people couldn't cope with the default theme.  I've got my eye on another theme to add to this site too, one that is a mostly white background - I'll keep you informed.

[Art]

I have a great Viewsonic Monitor but I also have "old" eyes!! 

[kaat]

If my question might be better answered in a different forum section, could you please move it?

Or, if you think it's unlikely I'll get this kind of help here, could you recommend other AI sites?

Many thanks.

[Freddy]

We get a few programmers coming through here but I wish I had a pound for every time someone starts writing their own bot and are never heard from again !  I'm not saying you will sink without all trace, but I often think it would be better to find an existing project to collaborate on.

A forum I can suggest which is good for programmers is the Vhumans forum :

http://www.vrconsulting.it/vhf/

There's a few resident programmers there that might be able to assist with this enquiry.

Good luck with your ideas

[kaat]

I certainly recognize the pitfalls you refer to. I don't want to reinvent the wheel; even just with PHP resources, I think I could knit together something nice, but again, I don't think it's efficient enough. So I'm after education on other existing, more efficient platforms.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[Freddy]

Going back to your original post...

One approach I've been thinking of is to create a totally stripped-down custom engine to run server-side, handling the AI and database functions. Do people do this? Does it sound like "you have no idea how much work that would be"?

This is what services like Pandorabots are already doing - to be honest I can't think of why you would want to do it client-side anyway - server-side makes the most sense.  Probably the most successful chat or forum based bots around at the moment are based around ALICE and AIML technology.  There are plenty of flavours available in terms of programming languages.  This also includes PHP and SQL...

The main AIML PHP/SQL interpreters are Programme E and now Program O.  Programme E development has unfortunately all but disappeared.  I have tried it out in the past, it has bugs, things don't work right and so on...but if you know PHP then you should be able to customise it quite easily.  There are a few people still swapping ideas around at SourceForge.

Now Program O is a new-comer, I haven't had a play with it, but again it is based on SQL/PHP.  What would be most interesting about this version is that it is under active development.  It looks promising.

So you can see that there are existing options if you just want a 'simple' chat-bot type AI.  And with your knowledge of PHP you could customise them however you like.

How best to balance a high-traffic, but simple chat front-end with all the 'background' AI processing that must occur?

In my experience with PHP and SQL, they are pretty good at dealing with a lot of traffic.  If you look around the internet you will find a mulitude of forums with hundreds or even thousands of members and most of these are based on PHP/SQL.  They handle a lot of interaction very well indeed.  A lot of it depends on the server of course and it's ability to handle large volumes of data (bandwidth in other words).

I doubt you would run into problems unless you really do have an obscene number of interactions.  Pandorabots is the only chat bot service that I know of that has this problem, but they must be dealing with many thousands of interactions an hour.  The answer to that is to spread the load over more severs, but since it's a free service mainly there are limitations money-wise.

Anyway, here's some links :

Programme E : http://sourceforge.net/projects/programe/

Programme O : http://www.program-o.com/

I hope that helps a little.  

[kaat]

This is most helpful, thanks a lot Freddy. I haven't abandoned the idea of using LAMP/WAMP yet.

Someone (forgive me if it was here) recommended Haptek; interesting company, and I'm now in conversation with them too.

[Freddy]

You're welcome.

Good luck with Haptek, it's still a nice avatar system despite the fact they don't market it very well.  There's a few of us here who know about Haptek so feel free to ask if you need some help.

[pygmalion]

I would just use/create a normal IRC chat room, and have your bot connect to it, and monitor the posts.

There are plenty of IRC bots out there,

I am building an AI one here,

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openpandorasbox/

It is in Java, supports IRC, uses a Derby database, and can learn from monitoring posts.

Public domain, so feel free to steal or contribute any code.

[kaat]

Pygmalion, I like your thinking.

Do you / does anyone know much about the kind of technology/infrastructure behind the highest volume chat rooms - e.g.: say, a Yahoo general chat?

I mean, if I wanted to host a huge chat room, what would it take?

Thanks.

[kaat]

FYI - I made up a "sample" chat room passage:

http://allthoseemails.blogspot.com/2009/08/can-pay-you.html