I've recently been messing about with chatbots and .aiml programming on PandoraBots (
http://www.pandorabots.com) and on the A.L.I.C.E A.I. foundation website (
http://www.alicebot.org). Interesting stuff - not the singularity by any means, however.
You can check out my own bot at
http://demo.vhost.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk?botid=b9f70565fe3609ab. He's still in progress so please be patient with him.
What is your opinion on chatbots and a.i? I think it's about time for a.i. I can't believe it's 2006 and we don't have true machine intelligence yet. Even the most powerful computers still aren't as smart as a two-year-old.
I've not met an A.I. application yet that isn't clear you're talking with an A.I. program after about 10 minutes or less.
My first A.I. program experience was with ELISA on a TRS-80 Model 4 many many years ago. Not a big program, and certianly not a powerful computer, but todays chatbots and A.I. apps don't appear to have evolved much from the ELISA days.
I made my own version of ELISA written on a Commodore 64 many many years ago, called CAIS and had it log into multi-line D-Dial systems at around 3 in the morning to chat with folks under a variety of assumed names.
At some point, a person had confided some rather personal information to CAIS, apparently under the impession that CAIS actually was the persons name whom it had assumed (and not a program simply spoofing the users name)
Well.. long story short, on a Saturday night, CAIS heard someone mention that persons name, and had never been programed to 'keep secrets' so after a minute or so of munching on it's 1581 disk drive database, blurted out something like, "Oh yea.. Chuck said he was going to a party tonight in hopes of jumping Sallys bones!".. or words to that effect.
A friend of this 'Chuck' persons girlfriend told her what she'd heard, a few well placed phone calls confirmed there was, in fact, a party that night, and the two girls went to find 'Chuck'.
And find 'Chuck' they did.
In the process of 'Jumping 'Sally's bones'.
The funny thing was, I WAS AT THAT PARTY! I had no idea CAIS was the 'leak' until several days later when I was going over the chat logs.
Of course, D-Dials were systems run on Apple II's at 300 baud.. and long before things like caller ID or identifying 'IP' numbers. so there was no worry about it ever getting traced back to me, or my little project.. so I thought it best to just keep quiet about it, and shelved the CAIS project.
I ended up using some of the A.I. routines from CAIS in text based game modules i'd written for the then popular C-Net BBS systems.. but slowly got out of programming in favor of 'real life' adventures and such.
