Hi,
I just took a look around again.  I’m very impressed with Morti.  It reminds me of how far away I am from getting something reasonably close to him.

Morti did respond with “XFIND” quite a bit. I’m certain that is some behind the scenes command mumble jumble flowing into his output text.  =)  I pulled up some tags by typing only “?”.

Can you explain the help examples such as “/ask Morti”.  I couldn’t get the format correct because Morti kept reading the “/” as ‘divided by’.

That was fun.

Regards,
Chuck

Hiya, Chuck!

I just had a look at a portion of your conversation with Morti, and I see that I need to make some changes to Morti’s command structure.

The only time you need to type “/ask Morti” is when you are having him ignore your chat input. This also extends to commands like “help” and “telescope”. In fact, “telescope” isn’t even a command, per se, so typing “/telescope” will result in some confusion for Morti.

As far as changing rooms is concerned, I’ll probably have to alter the help page to include instructions on how it’s done. It’s rather simple to do, and here’s how:

1.) Click on the link labeled “Room Map”.
2.) From the map, select the room you wish to enter.
3.) Enjoy your new location.

There are a lot of features within pChat that I haven’t added to the Help page. I’ll have to work on that soon.

BTW, I got Morti’s telescope command working in “Pre-Alpha” testing on my dev box. If you like, you can go to:

http://dmorton.no-ip.info/pChat/bot/telescope.php?name=the+pleiades

to check it out. Feel free to change “the+pleiades” to whatever astronomical object you wish. Right now, that’s a debugging page that shows certain variables, along with the chatroom version of the image tag, and the image itself. I still have to deal with handling the occasional malformed tag, but that’s just going to take time to do, as I have to note each incorrectly formed tag, and then create a rule to handle it. Morti should have a fully working “telescope” command in the next few days.

Dave,
Your link works nicely.  I tried a few planets and a constellation or two. I only wish I could ‘zoom’ pictures. =)

Can your telescope embed this site http://www.google.com/sky/ on your page?

OR

Here’s a plug in for google earth. http://earth-api-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/demos/interactive/index.html

Is it possible to enter commands that ‘wrap’ around these code snippets?

Regards,
Chuck

You know, Chuck? that just might be the answer to my problem of being able to use azimuth/right ascension coordinates with Morti’s telescope command. As it is, I’m using a combination of Google Image search and APOD to get the images, but Google Sky just might be a better way to go. I’ll certainly look into it.

I’ve taken a brief look at Google Sky, and I like it a lot. What I may be able to do is to create a “viewing pane”, similar to the other panes I’ve already got coded into the page, with the viewer embedded. Then, Morti can cause the pane to become visible, and point the telescope to the correct coordinates, based on either the name or the location of the intended object. My only concern is that users would have to have the Google Earth plugin to view it. I may even be able, however, to detect the plugin through JavaScript, and replace the viewer with the proper image. Hmmm… Lots of stuff to think about. I’ll keep you posted.

Chuck Bolin, I LOVE you! (relax, pal. Not in THAT way. )

Have a look at http://dmorton.no-ip.info/pChat/telescopeDivTest.php

This is just a “Proof of Concept” page, with no working controls yet, but the viewer can be moved about by using the mouse to drag/zoom, or the nav controls in the window. I have yet to code the functions to have the viewer position itself, and it looks like setting coordinates will be a lot easier than controlling it through supplying an object name. I’ll have to do some further research. But so far, this looks great.

Dave Morton - Jul 13, 2010:

Chuck Bolin, I LOVE you! (relax, pal. Not in THAT way. )

Have a look at http://dmorton.no-ip.info/pChat/telescopeDivTest.php

This is just a “Proof of Concept” page, with no working controls yet, but the viewer can be moved about by using the mouse to drag/zoom, or the nav controls in the window. I have yet to code the functions to have the viewer position itself, and it looks like setting coordinates will be a lot easier than controlling it through supplying an object name. I’ll have to do some further research. But so far, this looks great.

Excellent!  Don’t worry…I’m pretty secure! =)

It may be possible to have Morti ‘chime’ in each time someone positions the scope.  He could offer an observation or two related to an astronomical feature.  I believe in AIML that’s a topic and a template.

Look forward to seeing what you can do with this.

Regards,
Chuck

Well, you can scratch the whole “no working controls” part. The viewer works even better than I had hoped for. Not only that, but you now have an active choice between using the viewer, or viewing a random image. It even has means to “gracefully degrade”, if the viewer database can’t locate the named object that was requested, falling back on an APOD image. If that fails, an alert box pops up, informing the user that the requested object was not found, and to please use other search terms. My biggest challenge now is to integrate it into the chat room so that only user that makes the request sees the viewer pop up. I think I can make that work, but I’ll have to think on the best technique to use.

I generally don’t like to “blow my own horn”, but I really think this deserves a toot or six.

YAY! I finally got the telescope command integrated into Morti’s code. Here’s the rundown:

Morti’s telescope command only works in the Observatory. If you try to use it anywhere else, Morti will let you know that you need to head there to use it.

The telescope uses the Google Earth plugin to display all sorts of information about certain celestial objects. The GE plugin is supported by IE 6+(supposedly), Mozilla browsers 2.0+ (I think), Google Chrome, and Flock 1.0+. I’m afraid the Google Earth plugin isn’t supported by either Opera or Safari, but there’s a “fallback option” available, and it automatically kicks in for folks who can’t use the plugin, or who don’t wish to install it.

If the object you’re looking for can’t be found in Google Earth, or if you didn’t/can’t install the plugin for your browser, you can still view images taken from NASA’s APOD website, based on what you were searching for. Since Google Earth doesn’t have any data at all on the planets, or their moons (their bad, not mine), all you can look at are the images, but the image feature is MUCH more flexible.

If for some reason the script can’t find a suitable image for your search, you’ll be notified of the fact, and asked to try other search terms.

I’m planning on adding an “auto-correct” feature, for commonly misspelled astronomy terms, so that you don’t have to look up the spelling of, say, Betelgeuse. This feature, however, is slated for “down the road a bit”, so don’t expect it quite yet.

The telescope feature is a “private” viewing experience, meaning that if you and I are in the Observatory together, and I call up the telescope, it only pops up on my end. If you want to see what I’m seeing, you would have to type in the same command.

Some suggestions for the telescope command are:

1.) Google Earth:
Most of the Messier Objects (e.g. M1, the Crab Nebula, M45, the Pleiades, etc.)
Constellations
Certain named stars (Betelgeuse, Polaris, Sirius)

2.) Images:
SOHO comet or SOHO CME (Both are pretty cool. Er… hot? Um..)
Any/all of the planets and/or their moons
Hoags Object (try just “telescope Hoag”)

There are 2 minor issues that I’ve noticed. One is that sometimes, the image viewer loads several images in rapid succession. I’m looking into this, and will have a solution soon. The other issue is that sometimes, the image doesn’t seem to match the search terms. This is something that I may or may not be able to do anything about. It’s not a rare occurrence, perhaps, but it’s uncommon enough that I’ve placed a low priority on it.

I’m also planning on placing a “Refresh” button in the image viewer, to reduce the number of times you have to actually type the telescope command while searching for a specific image. Again, this is “down the road” stuff.

I think that pretty much covers it. Take a gander, and shoot me some feedback. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Dave,
Tested the telescope tonight. Most awesome.

Are you an amateur astronomer?  If you you might want to program Morti to comment on what the user has selected to view…sort of your own personal viewpoints.

Now that you have a telescope…how about a google earth tool that does something similar?

Regards,
Chuck

Actually, Chuck, the telescope already uses Google Earth. But since Google Earth doesn’t have a very comprehensive database yet, I’ve scripted the image viewer that you saw as a “fallback” option. To view the Google Earth portion, click the radio button on the top of the viewer’s upper frame that says “Map”. The GE plugin will appear, and you can use the telescope to direct GE to certain stars, nebulae, constellations, and a limited number of Messier objects.

BTW, I saw some of the scope commands you used, and they intrigued me. I’d imagine, however, that 90%+ of those commands would only produce images, rather than usable coordinates for Google Earth. I’m currently searching for an alternate website or other database of celestial bodies that return declination and right ascension data that I could use.

And if you can’t tell by now, yes, I am indeed an amateur astronomer. These last few months, I’ve been having a field day, viewing Venus after sunset. I’m waiting (not so) patiently for Mercury’s return to the evening sky, shortly.

Linking in google earth to your bot is immensely cool idea guys.  I want my bot to have access to that as well, i will have to educate myself on the API.

If I say, “I think we will be visiting my mom in Huntsville this weekend”,  it would be great for it to use google earth to calculate the distance and deduce it is quite far and reply accordingly, like “Wow, that is quite a trip!”  Or, perhaps the random number generater will cause it to ignore distance and focus on the last time we visited her, and say “Nice, it has been since Easter 2008 that you went up there, that I know of anyway.”

Dave,
Do you have the ability in code to download web pages and scrap data…or simply connect to a feed?  I’m thinking an interesting experiment with Morti would be to encode a few variables in some AIML responses that would require Morti to…

* download a web page file and scrape data or connect to a feed
* format the standard response with the new information
* Output the response.

I’m thinking maybe the local weather forecast, stock prices, etc.

Conceptually, I think this has a lot of merit in enhancing AIML. What do you think? 

Regards,
Chuck

As a matter of fact, both the telescope command and the search command use “scraping” functions to glean the information they need to display the data requested. I’m fairly sure that the next step of reading a data feed would be no big deal to accomplish. In fact, I was thinking of adding something like that to Morti’s code for reading other bits of data from the web.

The “experiment” you’ve outlined is already in place with Morti, in the form of the “search” command. If you type “search who is Jesse Ventura”, the script scrapes ask.com’s search page for the “most popular” answer to that question, and displays the results. The problem is that ask.com is constantly changing the HTML markup for the search page (probably to prevent exactly what Morti’s script is doing). I’ll probably have to try using another site, or try to come up with better scraping algorithms. Either that, or remove the search command altogether.

Conceptually I agree that this sort of functionality would enhance an AIML bot, certainly. But as far as enhancing AIML itself, I don’t really think so. AIML is nothing more than an information framework that contains data for a bot to parse. The bot script itself is what would read the feeds and pages for data mining.