Lately, I’ve heard the term “pure AIML” used in discussion.  How does the term “pure AIML” correspond to terms like “left up to the implementation” found in the documentation? 

What is “pure AIML”?

I think it’s code that’s been doused in Holy Water® and blessed at the Church of the Divine Pandorabot, by the High Priest Dr. Richard Wallace himself.

Seriously, though, “pure AIML” (if I remember the original context properly) doesn’t really have any special meaning at this point. It could refer to an AIML interpreter, such as Program AB, that only uses AIML files, and not some other means of storing the AIML categories. To contrast, Program O stores the AIML categories in a MySQL database. It even accesses them differently, when you get right down to it. In a very technical sense, Program O doesn’t use “pure AIML”, when examined from that perspective.

Alternatively, if you have a chatbot engine that merges AIML with some other technology (e.g. ChatScript or JAIL), then you have a chatbot that doesn’t use “pure AIML”. Of course, so far as I know there isn’t such an animal at this point in time, but there could be, one day.

I think “pure aiml” came about with Mitsuku, where all of the bot’s abilities are in the aiml files themselves. For example, Mitsuku can do comparisons a la “which is bigger”, math questions, play games, and all kinds of things that previously were done with the “system” tag to call the operating system, or to use an external exe program to accomplish the same goal.

If you can program in aiml, then you can make pure aiml do some amazing things in my opinion. Steve’s Mitsuku is the first example that comes to mind.

Robby.

Robby Garner - Jun 21, 2014:

I think “pure aiml” came about with Mitsuku, where all of the bot’s abilities are in the aiml files themselves. For example, Mitsuku can do comparisons a la “which is bigger”, math questions, play games, and all kinds of things that previously were done with the “system” tag to call the operating system, or to use an external exe program to accomplish the same goal…

That was certainly my impression too.

Can an AIML interpreter of 60 lines of PHP, with every one of its responses generated by 40 categories of AIML, claim to be pureAIML?

Reference: http://www.elizabot.com/show/pureAIML

A bot with just 1 category can be pure AIML.

Steve Worswick - Jun 24, 2014:

A bot with just 1 category can be pure AIML.

But I wouldn’t expect much from said chatbot.

I wouldn’t expect much from a chatbot with just 40 categories either.

Not expecting much, can come in handy sometimes.

P-8 is an abbreviation for Program 8.

Program 8 supports 8 tags in AIML files:
xml, aiml, category, pattern, template, random, li, star.

Transcript: Elizabot.com/show/pureAIML - Jun 26, 2014:

YOU: Hello
P-8: Hi there! 

YOU: Are you dumb?
P-8: What makes you think I am that? (dumb)

YOU: I don’t know?
P-8: May you do that yourself?

YOU: Oh, shut up!
P-8: We’ll go over it in a few minutes.

Program 8 is a pure AIML chatbot, which is a thousand times smaller
than a standard AIML chatbot with 40,000 categories.

Reference: http://www.elizabot.com/Program8

Thank you.