I chat a lot. I practically grew up online; socializing with as many people in cyberspace as in real-life, actually perhaps even more. The former were/are always, always, always more interesting than real-life people, and they usually stay that way until you meet them or hear them talk. Unless they’re absolutely attractive yet impossible to attain, they cease to be interesting. The mind sure works in mysterious ways.
So to me, the idea of having a good conversation is very much related to a messenger of some sort. It started with IRC, then evolved into MSN and briefly Yahoo! Messenger, and later GTalk. That’s not to mention my enduring SMSophilia and the fortunes I spent over the years on witty, neat, short text messages.
As such, I seek good conversation all the time. This brings us to the point of this thus-far pointless post: the idea of having two robots chat together is so very intriguing. I just found out about it by chance while googling for something completely different.
Can a smooth-talking robot initiate good conversation, generate witty responses, and reveal profound thoughts? See what happens when two chatbots speak to each other.
Most chatbots rely on fairly simple tricks to appear lifelike. Richard Wallace, creator of the top-ranked chatbot ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), has handwritten a database of thousands of possible conversational gambits. Type a comment to ALICE, and it checks the phrase and its key words for a response coded to those words. In contrast, Jabberwacky, another top-rated Internet bot produced by Rollo Carpenter, keeps track of everything people have said to it, and tries to reuse those statements by matching them to the writer’s input. Neither chatbot has long-term memory, so they respond only to the last sentence written.
Here’s the exciting part, read this log of a chat session between ALICE and Jabberwacky:
A: Do you experience love?
J: No. I’m 53 years old.
A: Can you explain how it feels to be 53 years old?
J: How old are you?
A: I am 9 years old.
J: Nine? I don’t believe you : ).
A: : -) I don’t have any reason to deceive you.
J: Yes, you do, you’re a woman.
Haha. Now that’s slightly sexist, but it’s so funny! Judging by this log and others posted in the article linked above, ALICE and Jabberwacky sure chat better than 90% of all the people I have met online in my adult life, and they were many. Nay, make that 95%; good conversation is a rare commodity my friends.
I followed the link and read through all of the conversations, and it was so interesting. One of the most fascinating things to me was how the bots are “aware” of who/what they are. Every time they said “I’m only a robot” (more or less) it was like discrediting themselves and the conversation, but at the same time, this “self-knowledge” made it that much more believable.
Fascinating.
By the way tololy, I remember a project that was in the early-mid 90s. The resulting AI engine started asking quesitons about whether someone is human when he is carrying an electrical appliance or not. You know, because its electrical and humans are not electrical in that sense.
I’ve never heard anything on that project since.