This could be a real problem...

Last weekend I noticed the following update on the Pandorabots site:

[May 23, 2011]

Updated Policy Guidelines for Free Community Server

1. Resource usage

Pandorabots provides a (free) Community Server at www.pandorabots.com. This server is intended for botmasters to experiment with new AIML bots that use limited resources. The Community Server is home to more than 200,000 bots created by more than 150,000 botmasters. Pandorabots has served more than 1.2 billion interactions. Please remember you are sharing resources with all these pandorabots and their botmasters.

If the Community Server resource limitations are inadequate, please contact Pandorabots at info@pandorabots.com to learn about our other alternatives.

In any event Pandorabots reserves the right to remove, modify or disable a pandorabot on the Community Server when we deem that the pandorabot misuses the Community Server resources. The types of issues that may lead to intervention by Pandorabots include (but are not limited to) to these circumstances:

• Use of automated scripts to make your pandorabot talk to itself or another bot or script...

As the title line says - this could be a real problem. The Pandorabots site offered the most elegant solution for my project. Through it I could train and deploy the bots and then control their interaction with an independent Flash/Actionscript interface. If I lose the ability to use Pandorabots it would be like, in old fashioned theatre speak, losing my two lead actors, the rehearsal space and the theatre!

I've sent the people at info@pandorabots.com an email. Hopefully the reply will suggest a solution that works for all of us.

I'll keep you posted.

Version 15 - that was fast

The attached version - upgraded from yesterday - now concludes with a generic set of lines. These are just simply throw away lines to end the conversation after a fixed number of interchanges.

Detayle:That's enough out of us!

Trickster:That's enough out of you then!

Detayle:Enough already!

You can clear all the fields and all the text by clicking the 'Clear' button.

Most of the dialog is based on the standard Alice set. However, a few AIML elements have been changed - those relating to 'mother', 'science fiction' and 'Star Trek'.

Have a play and let me know what you think.

This is a link will open a new browser window displaying the Flash .swf interface of Version 15

The bots are hosted on the Pandorabots site ( Pandorabots )

Version 14 - some progress

The interface, except for window dressing issues, is largely behaving as it should. My supervisor noticed that in my earlier example the text from the bots loaded up the screen rather than down. Surely this is a simple fix??? Indeed, in the end, it was simple. However, it took some five versions to get it to behave properly. It now works and the 'break-though' was such an inconsequential fix (literally rearranging the order in a concatenated string of text - even that makes it sound harder than it was). I suppose that's just the way it goes - iterative and recursive attempts - successive approximations.

You can clear all the fields and all the text by clicking the 'Clear' button.

Most of the dialog is based on the standard Alice set. However, a few AIML elements have been changed - those relating to 'mother', 'science fiction' and 'Star Trek'.

Have a play and let me know what you think.

This is a link will open a new browser window displaying the Flash .swf interface of Version 14

Multple sentence answer problem

There are a couple of things I'm going to try.

1. Edit the AIML to remove full stops in the

Two bots chatting - test

Below is a link to a test interface (Version 9 - 14 January 2011). It is still a 'work in progress' with several issues to be resolved. However, as a 'proof of concept' it's alright to play with.

To start them chatting type in some text in the text field at the top of the interface and click the 'Start Talking' button.

They will keep going until you click the 'Stop Me' button. As they go they get more and more confused - this is one of the issues to be resolved. In particular, the issue of sentence splitting needs to be resolved. If one bot answers with a reply that contains multiple sentence (e.g. I love Star Trek. My favorite series is 'Voyager'.) the other bot will try to supply an answer for both sentences. This very quickly gets out of hand - more and more sentences being passed between the two. Just hit the 'Stop Me' button.

The bots are hosted on the Pandorabots site ( Pandorabots )

You can clear all the fields and all the text by clicking the 'Clear' button.

Most of the dialog is based on the standard Alice set. However, a few AIML elements have been changed - those relating to 'mother', 'science fiction' and 'Star Trek'.

Have a play and let me know what you think.

This is a link will open a new browser window displaying the Flash .swf interface

Bergson - agency and structure

In his essay of 1911 Bergson proposes a ‘new law’ of humour, “We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing” (2005, p.28). In this project his ‘law’ will be tested by inversion; will we laugh every time a thing gives us the impression of being a person? Further, will the incongruity of our impression oscillating between the human and the non-human call forth a shared anxiety that we have about media technology?

Bergson's concept of the mechanical encrusted ('plastered' may be a better translation of the original French) on the human is analogous to the relationship between agency and structure. The individual's agency is, for want of a better term, their free will - their ability to act in the world by making choices that have real consequences. The mechanical is then all of the structures of the world. These structures are typically described by rules and laws: the laws of physics, the rules of language, the rules of etiquette, and even the rule of law. Cartoon 'violence' toys with laws of physics - the coyote lives and dies as a result of these laws. The pun, the malaprop and the double entendre are manipulations of the laws of language. Borat shatters the rules of etiquette. The Keystone Cops, Top Cat's Officer Dibble, Rumpole of the Bailey, and so many others expose the farcical nature of the rule of law.

Giddens concept of 'structuration' brings agency and structure together - each dependent of the other. A kind of co-dependent marriage. There is a deep level of incongruity between agency and structure. Not all incongruity leads to comedy but is it a necessary if not satisfactory condition.

Bergson was talking about these subterranean incongruities.

Henri Bergson, Laughter: An essay on the meaning of the comic.

A little success story

Two bots are now up and running on Pandorabots. I created a new one today called Detayle Bhoy. The initial bot is currently called MMM, however, he responds as Mr Dick Trickster.

The reason for starting up the second bot... I've got the Flash interface working. The output from one becomes the input for the other and so on... I had to build a StopMe button just to get the to shut up! They are completely nonsensical at the moment. As the 'conversations' go on they tend to generate multi-sentence / multi-line replies. These in turn generate even more milti-sentence text that is nearly always bizarrely self referential. This is something I'll serious need to address in the AIML sets. I may even try to kill of 'second sentence' categories.

As these bots share a common base of AIML there is also a lot of recursion going on. This too is something I'll have to edit out.

Jobs for another day.