[Wolves] Crying Wolf? Nanobots and e-funding

[sparkes]

On Fri, 2004-03-19 at 23:35, Rob Annable wrote:
> A couple of interesting articles on NTK.net at the moment. The first of which 
> has also been boingboinged. Somebody from Wolves has raised suspicians by 
> claiming to have unleashed an army of bots that would cheerfully nail the 
> Turing test. Anybody know him?
> 
> http://www.ntk.net/2004/03/19/
I read that and I thought fscking hell, nanobots taking the turing test
why don't I know anything about that?  That would have been all over the
BBC! in fact it could have been all over us right now ;-)

After a stroll NTK wondering how I missed this yesterday I noticed it
was the nannybots story ;-)

This is interesting but he isn't going to take the turing test because
his bots are only programmed for a limited range of topics and therefore
must be using case based reasoning.  This approach will never win the
turing test because you would have to model intelligence to totally fool
an observer.  It does however win the Loebner Prize almost every year in
some form or another where topics can be limited and the human
partisipent is not allowed to fsck with the bot to the same level that
people normally do.  They do get some interesting exchanges with
deliberate misspellings and things though.

Personally it doesn't look that hot.  The example exchange on the new
scientist site looks staged.  How well would it cope if you threw it a
curve ball half way into the conversation about robocop 2 and started
talking about something totally different that required knowledge rather
than a set of selected answers.  I can produce the aiml required to make
an alicebot repond like a teenager over a limited range in the time it
takes to type it in.

A bot chatting online (web, aim, msn, jabber and irc) would only take
about 2 hours development using pyaiml (http://pyaiml.sourceforge.net/)
and twisted (www.twistedmatrix.com) infact I have the source code to a
simple aiml bot here to hand (I play with aiml sometimes) this is the
example from pyaiml (I think)

import aiml
k = aiml.Kernel()  
k.learn("palice.xml")
k.respond("load aiml b")
while True: print k.respond(raw_input("> "))

you can grab some aiml to test this from www.alicebot.org (if you can't
get it working I can drop some code over to you) Developing the aiml
reponces to make this respond as a teenager would take the most time but
it is only a case of typing it in and testing it interetivly.

If the anyone does now the bloke in question (who claims he doesn't want
to profit from the invention) I would be interested in working on a
GPL'ed version of code to see how far a couple guys from Wolverhampton
can take the virtual teenager.

sparkes