What to do with a web server? Enter a geeky contest!
The apache server I struggled to get up and running on my home computer came in handy recently - along with having PHP and MySQL installed. I spent a good part of the spring working on making a chatbot that would be entered into one of the geekiest contests I've ever seen - a contest based on the Turing Test.
The Turing Test - conceived by Alan Turning more than half a century ago - is a test to see whether a robot, a machine, an AI, can fake it's way to being human. For the past 18 or so years, a contest called the Loebner Prize has implemented a version of the Turing Test where contestants submit "chatbot" entries that are compared against humans. The bot that is the best at it wins.
About a week or so ago I submitted my entry. The preliminary judging happens over the next two months with finalists (there will be 6 this year) being announced in August and the finals themselves in October.
A version of the chatbot I submitted is open to the public for chatting - please chat - I still have the opportunity to improve on my submission and will be doing so!
The Turing Test - conceived by Alan Turning more than half a century ago - is a test to see whether a robot, a machine, an AI, can fake it's way to being human. For the past 18 or so years, a contest called the Loebner Prize has implemented a version of the Turing Test where contestants submit "chatbot" entries that are compared against humans. The bot that is the best at it wins.
About a week or so ago I submitted my entry. The preliminary judging happens over the next two months with finalists (there will be 6 this year) being announced in August and the finals themselves in October.
A version of the chatbot I submitted is open to the public for chatting - please chat - I still have the opportunity to improve on my submission and will be doing so!
Talk to Adeena's chat bot.
If you do chat, please focus on "conversational memory" and "B.S. detection". Those are two areas I am still actively working on.
One good thing that's come from this (besides improving my PHP and MYSQL skills), I actually read Alan Turing's original paper. It was one of those that I had read references to over and over without having seen the real thing. This is all too normal - folks referring to something they know about indirectly. In college, I tried to read a pile of original sources... I read Einstein's famous papers from 1905 (okay - not in German, although I do have a copy of the original German paper), Michael Faraday's famous papers from the mid 1800's and so on.
Wish me luck!
Wish me luck!
PS - what did the web server and all that have to do with this? The chatbot is written in PHP and MYSQL and hosting is on my home computer first allowed me to test it standalone before putting it up on the website. The preliminary rounds can be web-based, but the finals will need to be on a standalone computer, so knowing how to do this now is key. :)
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5 comments:
hey
i lieked the name of ur blog!!
Question: How do you program its database? Is it relational, sequential or otherwise? IN order to be truly AI (as is the human brain), I would htink it needs to be relational in a sort of bubble-sort kind of way. IMHO too many try to program the data in a linear format rather than relational. Your thoughts?
Mickey Fox
LnkedIn.com/AttorneyMickey
It is relational (although individual tables are indexed sequentially - i.e., ISAM). However, what I have is still fairly simply at this point and that's what I'm working on expanding. There seems to be huge divides in the AI chatbot community on how data should be stored and communicated.
I played with it a little today and I can certainly tell that it's a bot. The thing that gives it away is the inability to track a conversation and it's relative meanings and nuances.
I found this blog by searching for "PHP chat bot." I want to find something that won't take me a lot of brain power to implement, and I want to link it up with out internet-connected LED sign. I think it would be funny to have something physical snark back at the user. It takes the chat bot idea and makes it a physical object that they interact with. Oh, the humanity! A robot!
Yep - he's definitely a bot. :) But the question is (at least for the contest) "Is Orion a better bot than the other entries?" I'd love to get some feedback on that. You can goto: http://alicebot.blogspot.com/ and see the other entries that also provided a link.
As for getting started - I *highly* recommend using Program E (can be found on sourceforge). It was pretty easy to get started with it. There were a few bugs, that are documented in the forums (I've actually recently been added as a developer on the project and am meaning to update the repository soon). Let me know how it goes! (Oh - also check out pandorabots.com and sitepal.com if you're looking for something to integrate into your website)
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