Botistry

Posted on August 5, 2004 in Bots

Right in the middle of writing the en-brain.aiml file, I got fagged out. There is only so much rewriting you can do at a stretch and I felt a need to write other things. Think of a few hundred questions, each of which requires one or more answers. This is the job which awaits anyone who programs a bot.

There isn’t really a right way or a wrong way to talk to a bot except that you don’t want to hit it with excessive long sentences or recite poetry at it because, despite the much ballyhooed progress of “artificial intelligence”, a bot doesn’t get that. Nor does it understand riddles or jokes, no matter how much programming by the numbers you put into it.

To rest my mind from these weighty affairs, I’ve simply followed the daily logs as they come in. The questions people come up with for the bot help reveal both the bot’s limitations and their personal prejudices or inclinations. For example, when a certain Mainiac asked “Is the empire at war with anyone right now?” Norton was thrown for a loop because his scripting caused him to leap to the suffix at the end (“right now”) and base his response on that. Chatters are best advised to keep things simple because, after all, this originates on a computer and computers are divine idiots, able to produce garbage at a rate that boggles the human mind.

Of course, there are those who use Emperor Norton as a springboard for their little digs. One San Jose chatter asked my bot “Is Joel nuts?” and when Norton couldn’t understand that simple question, repeated it as “Is Joel insane?” Training helps me keep up with the bizarre queries that Norton’s fans invent, though I doubt that I will ever have an answer for every question that bubbles up from the crevices of the human mind.

Thank you even for the odd questions….And if you want to know what Norton says now about my sanity, just ask him. (AIM)