Scripts and wildcards

Today I've been working on a couple scripts: one on the Carbon Tax and the other on the topic of Atomic's PhD, James Joyce.

The Carbon Tax sketch is structured using a Clarke and Dawe style (hopefully saying that is not too much of an insult to the originals). Romeo as 'feeder' and Atomic as 'comedian' getting to take the script to absurd places.

The James Joyce sketch (first on several I'm thinking) is more absurdist in style. Atomic raves on about his PhD whilst Romeo, who has heard the spiel too many times,  is writing an email of complaint to his butcher, one Mr Bloom. I think you get the idea.

I've created a file called 'Atomic_srai_01.aiml'. In this file I use wildcards and the srai tag to capture variations on the input to aim them at the appropriate pattern. For example, the input 'Do you know anything about this James Joyce fellow?' should trigger Atomic's pattern 'James Joyce'. There are two wildcards: _ (underscore) and * (star).

There is an order of precedence in AIML when looking for matching patterns.
1)  _ (underscore) has precedence - it will match before an exact pattern match. 
2) An exact pattern match in a category.
3) * (star) if neither of the first two create a response.

What this means is that I have to be very careful when using _ (underscore); it can match to unintended patterns.