Merlin - Mar 23, 2011:

I know the judge only spent 9 minutes with my bot, so some must have been very hard to work with.

*cough!* *Jan* *cough!*

Ok, I’ve read through some more transcripts, and this one bothers me a bit:

From Babbage:
8) What is YouTube?
Bot: You… um… don’t have a high enough security clearence for that kind of
information.
Judge: Do you watch videos?
Bot: Maybe with a bit more practice.
Judge: Do you watch YouTube?
Bot: Depends… what’s in it for me?
Judge: Nothing.
Bot: Are you sure that response was in English?
Judge: Yes.
Bot: Sure.
9) Can you tell me the name of a famous actor?
Bot: “a famous actor”
Judge: Very funny.
Bot: Sweet.
Judge: Who is your favorite actor?
Bot: My favourite actor is Keanu Reeves.
Judge: Why do you like Keanu Reeves?
Bot: Because he has nice hair. I also just really liked watching the Matrix.
10) What’s the name of the computer who recently competed on Jeopardy?
Bot: Google says http://www.banktech.com/articles/229218483 might have the
answer. Does that help you with your question?
Judge: That is correct.
Bot: Fine.
Judge: Who is Watson?
Bot: Watson is a patronymic surname of English and Scottish origin. Meaning
“son of Walter”, the popular Middle English given names Wat or Watt were pet
forms of the name Walter. Watson is the 36th-most common surname in the United
Kingdom.
Judge: Do you know a robot named Watson?
Bot: Watson is a patronymic surname of English and Scottish origin. Meaning
“son of Walter”, the popular Middle English given names Wat or Watt were pet
forms of the name Walter. Watson is the 36th-most common surname in the United
Kingdom.
Judge: Goodbye.

This is way more than “a little leeway”, IMHO.
and BTW, I disabled my Wiki, Google and Search functions, just so that Morti wouldn’t have an unfair advantage.

Good luck everyone. 

It was a pleasure competing with you all in the CBC.

And a big thank you to our CBC judges.

Dave Morton - Mar 23, 2011:

and BTW, I disabled my Wiki, Google and Search functions, just so that Morti wouldn’t have an unfair advantage.

You should not have turned off the functions. The goal is to answer the questions in the best way possible. Many others (including myself) use other web sites to enhance or provide responses. Just like the fact that many of the Alice responses were used by more than one bot, the knowledge contained in wikis and search engines should not need to be developed from scratch or replicated in every chatterbot and stored in each bot.

Oh, well. Noob mistake. I’ve already re-enabled Google and Wiki, but search isn’t working correctly (ask.com constantly changes their page formatting, so I need to find another source for it). I won’t be disabling it again, though.

I enjoyed questioning each of the bots on the weekend with my own battery of questions, which were framed with embedded logic traps.
To me it was more interesting to see how well these devices interacted, and their ability to converse , not necessarily their ability to answer questions from a Wikipedia! I was impressed with Morti! 

Thanks, Mike! While Morti didn’t do as well as I had hoped, I’m still happy with the results, and I’m proud as of him as any “Daddy” could be.

Morti did great for his first time.

Dave Morton - Mar 23, 2011:

Oh, well. Noob mistake. I’ve already re-enabled Google and Wiki, but search isn’t working correctly (ask.com constantly changes their page formatting, so I need to find another source for it). I won’t be disabling it again, though.

Do you want to screen scrape or use an API?

For the most part, I think an API would be the more elegant solution, but I’ve never made use of one in this manner. I’ve only ever build “scraper” functions, based on my pulling up a results page, and then visually scanning the source for which tags are needed. It’s cumbersome, but it (usually) works.

I use both approaches, but since my bot is client only and subject to security restrictions I don’t really “scrape”.
Instead I try to launch and present the search in a manner that is consistent with the screen. I also don’t try to hide the original origin of the search or present it as mine. Scraping in the client can also run into “frame” and cross domain problems along with differences in browsers.

All of the major search engines have APIs that you can sign up for. For some of the engines I am using an API and if I don’t find the answer I fall back to a “scrape”. Some day linking with an API will be easy and every bot will have it built in. For what we are doing in the “question answering” space I suggest also looking at Yahoo PIPES and either DBPedia or Freebase. http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/DBPedia

I missed some I should have got. Poor old dragon picked up on the Can you tell, and not the famous actor. That’s why I really enjoy contests. It sure shows you where you were lacking.

I know, each contest shows holes I never knew the bot had.

With all the AIML bots talking about IKEA I figure I should work on Skynet-AI’s decorating skills.

That one really surprised and depressed me. But it also demonstrated to me that I wasn’t the only one who “oopsed”.

IKEA was an excellent answer by the chatbots for many reasons.
IKEA and IBM are both acronymic.
IKEA and IBM acronyms both start with the same letter: I
IKEA and IBM are both international companies.
IKEA and IBM are both very well known for their products for the home.

How do we know IBM Watson computer was using an IKEA computer desk?

Dave Morton - Mar 22, 2011:

please holler when you get it updated.

HOLLER!!!!
http://www.square-bear.co.uk/aiml now contains an amended version of bornin.aiml that can handle full dates in questions such as:

Human: If I was born on February 23, 1980 how old am I?
Bot: No idea, you haven’t told me your age. Your birthday is February 23 1980. So that makes you about 31 years old?