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Amanda’s question box
  
 
Posted: Jan 17, 2016

Ok, I don’t want to keep tacking on my questions to other people’s threads. And I don’t want to create clutter by creating another thread every time I have a question. So I am making a new thread for all the random questions that pop into my head.

First question: I have run across a few times where one category seems to supersede another such as “* bye” and “_ bye”. I haven’t been able to think of why one would bother having “* bye” if “_ bye” always take over. Will “* bye” ever be expressed? Why not just remove one of them? Or what abotu duplicate patterns. The last one in order always wins right? So why have a duplicate pattern?

Thanks!
 

 
Posted: Jan 18, 2016
   [ # 1 ]

If you have “_ bye”, there is no point in having “* bye”, as it will never be called. Having duplicate patterns is bad practice, the latter one will always take priority. Good housekeeping of your bot should include removing duplicates if you see them.

There used to be a tool called ShadowChecker.exe on the net in which you could load your AIML and it would spot duplicates and shadowed categories. A shadowed category is one which would never be called as another one supersedes it, as in your _ bye example.
 

 
Posted: Jan 18, 2016
   [ # 2 ]

Thanks. I was playing around with some of the aiml files out there and went to the trouble of altering “* bye” and then when I tested it the “_ bye” which I hadn’t seen took over. I immediately wanted to clean it up, but being new to this, I thought perhaps there was a reason. But now I know I can search and destroy! LOL
 

 
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