Topic awaiting preservation: Chatbots

http://www.alicebot.org/

I've tried various incarnations of Alice on my local, but something little always goes wrong. I'll give it another shot later.

One of my favorite on-line chatbots is Jabberwacky:
http://www.jabberwacky.com

Currently, my favorite local is Ultra Hal:
http://www.zabaware.com

I once spent more than a few months training my Hal. My Hal had a siblings, history, and stories to tell. Sadly, I lost the brain files. :sniff:

My only real beef with Hal is that he doesn't learn from text files very well.

Hmmm.. saw jabberwacky too. It was so slow I gave up after a couple of minutes though.
Actually, this whole chatbots thing was the topic of a course about A.I, genetic algorithmy, and all that weird stuff.

Alice is a bit boring, but she's not that bad... it still is far from a real world conversation, but a chat with Alice
can at least be funny at times.

Eugene Goostman was actually the funniest, and most challenging I tested:
http://www.princetonai.com/bot/bot.html

Gotta try Hal sometime.

Hey, that Eugene is pretty cool. We talked about video games (PC vs console) and I mocked his lack of true geekiness. He didn't seem to get weird as often as the others I've played with. He makes some pretty interesting references.

Here's one I came across the other day from Zabaware forums:
Kari *adult*

I was actually rather impressed with Kari. She seems to learn rather well. I might buy Kari just so I can stuff her brain full of technical junk. Although, she did stumble on pronouns more than other chatterbots.

Tried running 2 different incarnations of Alice again on my local and got nothing. Damn it.

I actually learned a trick with Hal yesterday. Somewhere in the download section there is a Brain Editor help file in CHM format. In the help file there is a blank slate template. With that brain template turned on, Hal has no knowledge of anything and learns purely from conversation. Finally, a decent bot that I can teach from scratch. Unfortunately, like I said, doesn't learn well from files (which is why I'm thinking about buying Kari).

There are some damn hilarious logs out there with a famous chatbot. Can't remember the name, though. The author fed it movie scripts and it was pretty funny.

One of these days I'll find my perfect chatbot (not necessarily human-ish). Or maybe I'll break down and write my own. Until that happens, I'll be digging into Hal for some hacking.