When thinking about updating my profile the other day I noticed that there seemed to be something missing. While there is a “Profile Category” there didn’t seem to be a formal way of telling chatbots.org what we are actually hoping to achieve with our efforts in this field.

Reading the posts in the forums it is possible to glean some information about this, but maybe it would be useful to be able to search for like minded members too. For example, I am interested in natural language processing for “knowledge acquisition” but others have different reasons and motivations.

I listed a few possible goals below and wondered what changes, additions (or deletions) other people would like to suggest.

Assistant (executive)
Assistant (research)
Companionship
Customer Support
Entertainment
Knowledge Acquisition
Student Assignment (programming)
Student Assignment (other???)
Technical Support

If there has already been a discussion along these lines in the forum, please point it out as I must have missed it.

Why Are We Here?

You are all here to test my code…

http://www.8pla.net/php.flash.take4/

Andrew, to the best of my knowledge, there is no topic of this nature thus far. Well, until now, that is.

As to why I’m here, I find it very hard to quantify. The only “goals” that I consciously consider with regards to this community (and others, too) are to learn what I can about a subject that I find fascinating and exciting, and to help others. As far as any other things that I get out of my involvement here, such as “socializing”, meeting new people, enjoying the occasional bits of humor that crop up from time to time, etc… That’s all a bonus to me. that’s as close as I can get to what you’re asking, my friend.

@8pla:

Um…  [posted response censored]

Totally just kidding!
I truly, truly appreciate everyone’s support.

I know you’re kidding, Tom. It’s cool. We have similar humorous moods, it seems.

Andrew Smith - Jul 13, 2011:

...maybe it would be useful to be able to search for like minded members too..

Excellent suggestion! 

I must admit though that 8pla.net is pretty close my initial reason for checking out this forum- to get feedback on my bot from experienced and friendly AI experts.  However, Since I’ve been (mostly) lurking here, I have found the general discussions of AI issues also informative and one the the main things that now keeps me coming back.

Potential ‘why am I here’ category additions (?):
- Keep abreast of AI issues/solutions,
- Solicit experts’ opinions on my bot project pros/cons,
- Apply to my bot learnings from comments/suggestions made about other peoples AI projects.

These mostly fall under something like: ‘technical and philosophical guidance’

Good question Andrew.

I believe someday, we will be able to communicate with computers in natural language and they will understand. I think it is also possible to create the “illusion of intelligence”. If this is the same as “artificial intelligence” I am not sure. I would like an intelligent agent sitting on my desktop (or replacing my desktop) and have it do the mundane computer tasks that I would normally have to do. I want it to make me more productive. http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2010/10/14/

Additionally, when I first started my explorations, I wanted a search engine that would provide answers to questions, not just links to pages. In the past I have acted as web master for some sites and found that if you could easily answer “frequently asked questions” your user would be happier and more productive. Trying to find a way to accept a question in a variety of forms and give the user the right response was an interesting problem.

In my adventure to explore the issue I was led to the Chatterbox Challenge - A competition for question answering chat bots. I researched various technologies and ended up deciding to create my own bot (both the interpreter and database).

I am here to:
- present some of the lessons I learned over the last decade and share some of my experiences with others interested in the field. Sometimes I can point a new botmaster to a path that can make his journey easier.
- I built a “bot/AI” framework. I am evaluating if I should try to make it commercial, open source, or just continue it as a private pet project.
- I built a bot that has performed pretty well (Skynet-AI) and has some unique capabilities. I look for discussions of new techniques/approaches that could make it better and areas I should add back into my AI framework. I have also gained a lot from having smart people from this website hold extended intelligent conversations with my bot.
- I thought it might have been time to create an AI standard language. Call it a wikipedia for bots. I also had built a tool for 2 bots to talk to each other and thought this might be the best forum to set some guidelines.
http://www.chatbots.org/ai_zone/viewthread/312/
I’ve gotten some of my questions answered and other new interesting ideas continue to pop up. I am here to learn, explore and create.

Why am I here:
-well, so I can say stuff and have a reaction other then ‘he?’

Why am I working on chatbots:
-so one day, I don’t have to do it myself anymore
-so I will have something to stroll me around when I can’t anymore
-so I can finally be forgetful and don’t be bothered about it
...
bascically, because I want to be lazy

> http://www.chatbots.org/expert/marcus_endicott/37/

I agree with Andrew’s suggestion that “Why Are We Here?” would be better than the “Community Contribution” on Chatbots.org profiles.  (Somehow “Community Contribution” is very Dutch.)

I might add, I’m here to LEARN !

Is “Community Contribution” Dutch????

This area was/is actually meant to give people the opportunity to describe what their intention is to contribute instead of what they are expecting to get.

Is that Dutch? Or should we simply use other terminology? We’d be happy to change it. :-p

Actually, it amy not be a bad idea to give users the opportunity to let others know both; what they can offer the community, and what they wish to get out the relationship.  At least, that’s what I think.

Based on this experience I think in future I will try to phrase forum questions vaguely because it has produced a much richer discussion than I dared hope. For the sake of extracting a result that would be useful for Erwin out of all this, I’ll try to sum up what’s been said so far, which I think is now three different questions for our profiles (i.e. the existing question) and two possible new ones. I hope that this will in no way restrict any ongoing discussion though.

1. What kind of contribution can you make to the chatbots community? (the existing question)

2. What kind of chatbot software are you trying to create? (my initial suggestion)

3. What do you hope to gain from your participation in the chatbot community? (the prevailing discussion)

That sounds about right, Andrew. Something along the lines of:

“what can we expect from you?”
“what do you expect from us?”
“what is your specific interest regarding Artificial Intelligence?” (maybe I phrased this incorrectly, but some of us may not be interested in creating software at all)

Truthfully, I wouldn’t mind seeing an optional “advanced profile” questionnaire created that not only asks these specific questions, but a goodly number of others, as well, such as specific (I really seem to like that word, don’t I?) programming experience, if any, former project/team participation, academic accomplishments, etc. that apply to the field. This may sound strange, coming from someone who would have to answer “N/A” or “none” to the vast majority of said questions, but I think it would prove useful.

[edit]
Andrew, it’s often a fine line between being too specific (there’s that word again! Where’s my thesaurus?) in your questions or discussion gambits, and having the discussion become “too focused”, and being too vague in your offerings, and opening the door to an excessive amount of misunderstanding. I think that, so far, you’re walking that line more expertly than any tightrope-walker, so keep up the good work!
[/edit]

I thought this was going to be some kind of Philosophical thing hehe

We have a topic over on AiDreams for just the same thing and over the years people have been quite obliging.

I recently reworded it slightly but now it stands as :

Who are you, what do you do & what do you want to do ?

I am here because many things, first of all a friend of mine asked me why I am not in this community.. did not knew it..  then I jumped inside and saw all the threads, answered some and made some observations, got many answers some were also harsh (may be deserved), but the main idea is to learn, sniff around, see what other’s have reached to, get to know the state-of-the-art on this community, the topmost chatterbot, and may be give back some of my shallow expertise to the community.

And I must say I’ve got not disappointed,

I learned here some interesting things: first of all that almost all bots are AIML, an Eliza cousin, some exceptions are hidden (not disclosed), saw also an interesting open source bot language called chatscript (also pattern matching, but smarter), including the power of wordnet ontology, this got with many ideas similar to my implementation, so I conclude we, all the humans think very very alike, powder has been invented many times in different places, and this will continue to happen, thus we are a robust kind, creating collective intelligence.

This section is like a “shrink house” where you can confess your sins!

So here I go!

Also I must say I have developed a dialog framework, for about 5 years, its not a bot but a complete system, including a scripting language, which is also compiled into code and executable, the system ‘brain’ is constructed in a somehow complex way, using abstractions, parsing, statistics and a complex cognitive-object model, He is trying to figure out and make some ‘understanding’ of the conversation pragmatics, my goal is not to beat the Turing test, as I said many times, just got a simple and ‘stupid’ chatter-machine, but one which a human can say, after a conversation with specific a goal: “This chat system did understand me, it may seem somehow stupid and may ask also too much for clarification, but I could let is know what I needed, and it searched a solution for me”

This is my “holy grail” also my goals include that the system should be very robust and handle common sense, even from the morphological inputs up o the upper limit of inner-relations, It should solve deixis and anaphoric pointing, grounding and have some sense of situation, sensing (guessing) emotions of the human and having also some own emotional behavior, trying to get some empathy with the human.

Those are my goals, and as I saw no one has showed himself to be focused in this way, but there are many ideas running up and down the hill of knowledge, and some also are very funny -and also silly - to follow!

-thank you all!

Andrew Smith - Jul 15, 2011:

1. What kind of contribution can you make to the chatbots community? (the existing question)

2. What kind of chatbot software are you trying to create? (my initial suggestion)

3. What do you hope to gain from your participation in the chatbot community? (the prevailing discussion)

Dave Morton - Jul 15, 2011:

“what can we expect from you?”
“what do you expect from us?”
“what is your specific interest regarding Artificial Intelligence?”

Thanks for this! We’ll certainly add this to our wish list!!! First version 2.8 (the companies tab within /business), hopefully finished in the coming months, and then version 2.9, with new forum features and profile updates like this.

In general, we expect to have a wider audience, actually all people who are contributing to the field of humanlike conversational AI. Academic researchers, businesses and individuals. People in AI, but also in Animation, Speech Recognition, Robotics, Biometrics but also psychology, education and philosophy. So we have a few steps to go….

So I’d be thinking about something like this:

1. What do you expect to contribute to the community?

2. What do you expect to gain from others?

3. What are the current projects you are working on and do you need help?