[pandorabots-general] Form before function

Tue May 30 20:04:01 PDT 2006

Ron,

I think we are still some distance from "personality plug-ins,"
but I have been wrong before...

That said, I do think it is possible as Dr. Wallace says to
advance the art of effective AIML by subdividing the knowledge
base of bot responses into the type of things that the bot is to
answer and its awareness of itself and so on.  The Alice AAA set
is a good start, but when it comes to personality you are correct
that it is not designed for the creation of different personas.

It took me a week of grinding through the Reduce, Reducer and
Reductions files to just strip out the intermixed "chat" from the
NLP portion... so there is best practice #1... while you can, it
is not recommended to mix chat with NLP patterns... you can make
just as convincing a bot by having all spoken response in with
the redirect patterns... and those redirect patterns should be
grouped in personality, knowledge, etc. bundles.

One of the big advantages having an Editor provides is that it is
now practical to simultaneously edit a large AIML data set like
Alice and test/study the recursion efficiently.  We would like to
tie it back in to targeted feedback loops (say like the Superbot
program, but that's the idea for another group at the panel).

The separation of useful natural language reductions is useful
(and already well implemented - notice I didn't say done).  I am
sure we can come up with other general ways to make a bot smarter
regardless of context.

The hard part remains as you have said, creating a believable
personality that is not Alice.

Thru the new panel, I would like to get to the point that when
you want to create a new bot, you have a data set (or range of
data sets) to choose from.  Start with a bot with a "personality"
closest to that you are trying to create.

At Ai-Dealer we are trying to create a credible Abraham Lincoln
as President of the Virtual Humans.  He has his own story about
why he is here, knows he is a synthetic personality, is NOT
chatty (like Alice) and for a sense of humor is trying to master
the nuances of verbal expressions and observations of human
behavior that as a bot he is having difficulty understanding.

It is a big, huge, humungous, gigantic, mind-numbing task
requiring research, humor, and raw brute AIML force.  It is for
this reason that I had the Ai-Dealer developers build the AIML
Editor (although it probably sounded more like "Not no but Hell
no are we using Wordpad")... and you are right... we all
duplicate a large part of our efforts each time we individually
build our own bot...

Hence the panel.  I look forward to your contribution.

-----Original Message-----
From:
pandorabots-general-bounces+brian_hoecht=msn.com at list.pandorabots
com
[mailto:pandorabots-general-bounces+brian_hoecht=msn.com at list.pan
dorabots.com] On Behalf Of Dr. Rich Wallace
Sent: Tuesday, May 30, 2006 10:15 PM
To: pandorabots-general at list.pandorabots.com
Subject: RE: [pandorabots-general] Form before function

Very interesting and deep question.  There is already some
duplication
between files in the AAA set.  By duplication I mean categories
with
identical pattern, that, topic paths but different templates.
One would
like to ultimately build up a set of different generic AIML
personalities,
based for example on different personality types, that can then
be
customized with biographical details to create unique characters.

The history of the AAA set was motivated by two slightly opposing
factors.
 The original ALICE bot personality was hard-wired, so to speak,
to have
the personality of a robotic intelligence.  Think of a character
like
Bender, from Futurama, or the Computer from Star Trek.  ALICE was
pretending to be intelligent, but she always claimed to be a
computer
intelligence.

This was okay for the Loebner Prize Contests in 2000 and 2001.
But then
Loebner changed the rules and said that the contestant programs
had to
pretend to be human.   Around the same time, people began asking
for
commercial versions of the ALICE bot that could be customized for
a
variety of different applications, such as sales bots, teacher
bots,
celebrity bots, and so on, which would have quite different
personalities
than the original robot ALICE.

So much of the work in the AAA set is an attempt to parameterize
the bot
personality using bot properties such as name, age, location,
birthday,
favorites, feelings, emotions, personality type, species, genus,
order,
phylum, kingom, friends, and so on.  The idea is to make it
easier for
people to clone ALICE and create a God-bot, a Dragon, a Hobbit, a
Salesman, a Soldier, a Teacher or a Robot, or any other type of
charachter, mostly by changing the bot properties only.  Needless
to say,
this parameterization is still a work in progress.

It is actually quite difficult to draw the line between fact and
personality, even for the most generic things like symbolic
reductions and
informational questions like "What is 2 plus 2" becuase it
depends what
kind of personality you want your bot to have.   A joke
accounting bot
might answer "I can make 2 plus 2 be whatever you want it to be."

So basically I think duplicates are okay for the AAA set, so long
as they
are put into distinct files and somehow we indicate "choose this
file for
adult content, or this file for PG-13" and that sort of thing.  I
think it
would be neat to eventually evolve into a set of bots like
"AAA-Extrovert", "AAA-Introvert", "AAA-Idealist" or something
along those
lines.

> Doc,
>
> I have more time than money.  Every person that re-does the AAA
set or
> even
> just one or two files adds to a library knowledge others can
draw on if
> they
> are willing to share that knowledge.  Pandorabots are by far
the most
> simple
> to use and program bots on the market today.  The more people
who are
> willing to spend the time building on your foundation may do
more than
> imitate life at some point in the future.  With each new
personality
> created
> a whole new AAA set is born and that offers the opportunity to
others to
> pick and choose different personalities closer to what they
envisioned for
> their bot or customer service agent.
>
> How do you define a generic AAA set?  Whose answers (responses)
do you
> use?
> My sex.aiml file will look nothing like yours.  Where is the
common
> ground?
> There is no such thing as a generic set but there are things
that can be
> done to make the AAA set better.  There are ways to create full
AAA
> language
> sets.  I don't need to reinvent the wheel but I do need to
replace a few
> spokes.
>
> Ron
>>
>>You may want to take a look at the Superbot,
>>http://www.alicebot.org/superbot.html
>>
>>which is specifically designed to make it easy to create an
original bot
>>personality free of ALICE content.
>>
>>Rich
>>
>> > That is what I thought, but I thought I'd make sure before I
jump in
>> and
>> > completely redo the AAA set for my bot; stripping it down to
English
>>only,
>> > making it easier to do a full translation of the set which
can be
>> added
>> > later, and then expanding and reorganizing it to suit my
needs.
>> >
>> > The problem with the AAA set as it is now is that it is
built more for
>>the
>> > Alice bot at alicebot.org and I would have prefered
something a little
>> > more
>> > generic which would have been a little more adaptable for my
needs as
>>the
>> > Alice personality is built-in to the current set and I need
a
>> completely
>> > different personality.
>> >
>
>
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