Thread: Chat Bots and AI

Yay! Finally someone asked a question in the area of my expertise! Usually Ynot or Replicon come in and give great answers and I feel dumb. Now it's my turn to feel smart

What you are talking about is called ontology. It's mapping everything to everything else through relationships; sort of like a UML diagram for the universe. An example: A cheeseburger.

Cheeseburger Is Food
Is variant of hamburger
Has a bun
Has a cheese slice
Has a beef patty

Bun is bread

Cheese is dairy

Beef Patty is meat
has weight
has cooked amount

...

As you can see, it gets complicated fast. What a real chat bot would have to do is map everything in the english language. Not just words, but meanings, grammar, relationships, synonyms...

A complete ontology of the entire english language would be very massive indeed. The one that I'm familiar with is Protege. It places everything into one huge XML file, so it would be very large and slow to read. I'm sure that there are better ones out there, though that would put it in some sort of ordered database.

The nice thing about ontology is that it is very capable of learning. I'm sure that most learning AI software has one somewhere in it's system.

Wow, cool idea! idk if i could do it (seeing its only one programmer) but after i finish my 2D game engine id like to try to do what ur suggesting. Thanks

One problem with the online "chat bots" is that writing a half-intelligent program needs huge amounts of computing power and storage space
which is expensive, and most people aren't prepared to offer this on the web for anyone to arse around with

Also, any program with auto-learning capabilities is less likely to be available to the public, as it'll end up being filled with sex terms or whatever
and need to heavily maintained to keep it useful

There's a few half-decent ones out there on the net
but not a lot
most are squirrelled away in labs and their progress is both controlled and recorded

as a side note,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's capability to demonstrate intelligence. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. In order to test the machine's intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen (Turing originally suggested a teletype machine, one of the few text-only communication systems available in 1950).

also,

Try out personalityforge.com. They have an online chat-bot making language. I actually won 6th place in the Loebner prize in 2004 with one I made there.

Also take a look at WordNet for some ideas about parsing and understanding language.

Jabberwacky is one of the better chatterbots out there.