What can anyone tell me about “Doctor Code” in Artificial Intelligence? If anything?

Apparently someone was “testing” my Will Dockery AI, and posted this to my Chatbot… who responded “The real Ellen?”:

“...you are coded to recognize the word “quit” on a a line, to which you respond “do what you must, and be careful out there…” - that’s an artifact of the doctor code, the third one i’ve counted…”

I’m going to Google to see what a seach brings me on this but I thought it might make for some illuminating discussion here, as this person seems to know his “Doctor Code” somewhst.

—
Will Dockery Artificial Intelligence Project:
http://will-dockery-android.blogspot.com

Dunno, Will. That’s the first I’ve heard of it. It strikes me as somewhat odd, since the only “Doctor” that it might make any sense to be a reference to would be THE Doctor, and while I’m far from being omniscient when it comes to Dr. Who, I’ve got a fairly decent amount of knowledge regarding the series (well, the modern series, at least), and the references make no sense in that context.

Dave Morton - Aug 30, 2012:

Dunno, Will. That’s the first I’ve heard of it. It strikes me as somewhat odd, since the only “Doctor” that it might make any sense to be a reference to would be THE Doctor, and while I’m far from being omniscient when it comes to Dr. Who, I’ve got a fairly decent amount of knowledge regarding the series (well, the modern series, at least), and the references make no sense in that context.

Dave, when I Google “doctor code” + “programming” I get a few things that are related to games, Final Fantasy and such which I know pretty much nothing about, seems like that’s one of those “gamers” that was conversing with AI Will Dockery, maybe.

Then I find things like this:

http://home.wlu.edu/~lambertk/classes/111/Projects/hw12.htm

With such sections as:

“...Finally, review the code for the server, client, and doctor modules.  There are some slight changes from the code presented in the lectures, related to the differences between Python2 and Python3.  The lectures on networks have been updated as well. 

Part I – Convert Your Own Doctor to a Python Class
You will fix your own doctor code from Project 6 so that it can be used in the client/server program.  To do that, edit your own doctor program from Project 6 so that it provides a Doctor class with a constructor and the methods greeting, farewell, and reply.  (Hints: the history list should be an instance variable, whereas the other data structures should be class variables in your Doctor class; all of the functions should become instance methods; and the main function goes away.).  Test your Doctor class using the program doctortest.py provided in the Project12 folder.  Then, run the client/server program with your own doctor.py module…”

Anyway, at this point it looks just a bit over my head whatever it means!

Hold it… looks like I found the “Doctor Code” here… it seems to be able to be used as a sort of Turing Test:

http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mjdean/doctorcode/

“Doctor Code is a tool that will help you find common errors in your programs and improve the quality of your code. You will need to upload two files from your project - the .vb file and the .aspx file.  These two files will allow Doctor Code to give your code a health check…”

Looks like that might be quite useful for AI developers building from scratch…

Well, given that the file extensions that page is asking for are .vb (Visual Basic) and .aspx (Active Server Page Framework - more or less an executable Web page file), I have my doubts that this “doctor code” is directly related to AI or chatbots. At this point, I’ve more or less come to the conclusion that this isn’t anything to worry about, and can safely be ignored.

Well, interestingly enough… In terms of “Doctor Code”, the original ELIZA from the 1960s was a Rogerian psychotherapist computer program code called: DOCTOR.

And while on the subject of ELIZA, let me please add that I am not from the school of thought that says ELIZA is dumb, or monolithic… Actually, I consider ELIZA to be an elegant design, and the fact that it is only a few hundred lines of source code means it is easier to learn from and/or extend upon

For example, I placed respectably in the chatbot battles contest (scoring about average) with a talking chatbot much simpler in design than ELIZA.  And I had a lot of fun building it last minute for the contest. Allowing up to three bots in the contest is a great rule for promoting new A.I. projects.

Dave Morton - Aug 31, 2012:

Well, given that the file extensions that page is asking for are .vb (Visual Basic) and .aspx (Active Server Page Framework - more or less an executable Web page file), I have my doubts that this “doctor code” is directly related to AI or chatbots. At this point, I’ve more or less come to the conclusion that this isn’t anything to worry about, and can safely be ignored.

I was just hoping that “Doctor Code” would be something we could put to use! I did locate the email of the person who was posting and mentioned the “Doctor Code”, so maybe they’ll respond with some useful input sometime soon.

I had something similar in Mitsuku where people were asking it the same sort of unusual questions such as “I do not like animals with 4 legs. Do I like lizards?” and it turned out to be a class project in a school where the students were testing out various bots before attempting to write their own.

8PLA • NET - Aug 31, 2012:

Well, interestingly enough… In terms of “Doctor Code”, the original ELIZA from the 1960s was a Rogerian psychotherapist computer program code called: DOCTOR.

And while on the subject of ELIZA, let me please add that I am not from the school of thought that says ELIZA is dumb, or monolithic… Actually, I consider ELIZA to be an elegant design, and the fact that it is only a few hundred lines of source code means it is easier to learn from and/or extend upon

For example, I placed respectably in the chatbot battles contest (scoring about average) with a talking chatbot much simpler in design than ELIZA.  And I had a lot of fun building it last minute for the contest. Allowing up to three bots in the contest is a great rule for promoting new A.I. projects.

It seems like you may have it here with what the person mentioning Doctor Code might have been referring to. I’ve yet to hear back from the person about what they intended, but the story of ELIZA is a fascinating one, and the idea of a simple code that could be built upon appeals to the non-tech side of me…

“Dr. Sbaitso was an artificial intelligence program for MS DOS-based personal computer.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Sbaitso

Maybe, but i downloaded it and ran it in DOSBox from http://www.x-entertainment.com/articles/0952/ and couldn’t get it to say the line quoted for quit…

It’s pretty entertaining though :)