Ok maybe I am lame, maybe I am tired, maybe my brain is just fried by this terrible day (which is thankfully over as of 10 minutes ago…hurrah!) but I am stuck on something…

I was going though this tutorial on pandora bots http://www.pandorabots.com/botmaster/en/tutorial  (yes yes I am dork I am sure everyone else is well beyond this kind of tutorial by now) and I came to the section on SRAI where I got stuck. I can’t get some of the categories in the tutorial to work.The ones with both “_” and “*” in the pattern (eg - “_ TELL ME *”).

I have tried everything backward and forward…twice at least. I even tried removing the “_” to see if there was a spelling issue that I could not see, but when it was just “TELL ME *” it worked just fine. I am just using a free account on pandorabots and a blank bot aside from the stuff I have entered with the tutorial. According to the aiml file it is operating with aiml 1.0.

Am I missing something?

New morning, fresh eyes. So I took another crack at figuring this out. The code the tutorial contained was

It was supposed to deliver a response for something like “botname TELL ME question”, and supposed to deliver a response that matched question. But it is just delivering the default * response.

Well I tried a couple things. First I made a totally new and empty bot and then copy pasted everything exactly as it is in the tutorial. Same result. The bot responded with the default * response.

Then I tried swapping the order of the _ and the * in the pattern. Same results.

Then I tried swapping the order of the statements “question TELL ME botname” and got it to work the way it was supposed to. Only this was not the way the tutorial claimed it would work. So I can only conclude that the tutorial is wrong, out of date, or not matching the version of AIML pandorabots has me using. And it seems that star/ in the srai will basically read as the first wildcard in the pattern.

Oh well mystery solved, thanks for that help Amanda. Why don’t mention it at all Amanda, glad I could be of assistance. I can always count on you Amanda, when we put our heads together we are unstoppable!
hehe

I just checked it out. The tutorial is wrong. The category should be:

Otherwise, the bot is trying to answer the first part, which is it’s name rather than second part, the actual question.

Oh thanks!!

That is the first bit of code that has been wrong on the resources I have been checking out, but it doesn’t surprise me. Seems 90% of the links lead to 404 errors, one did something bizarre to my phone and I had to shut down the app to get it to stop buzzing. A lot of the webpages are in dire need of an update. Which is is making me all itchy because updating websites is my thing. Half the time I visit these pages I am distracted by the intense desire to fix everything LOL

If you are ever in any doubt, I wold advise posting here. I am always more than happy to help anyone with AIML.

Thanks.