This post is in response to http://www.chatbots.org/ai_zone/viewthread/560/

This is a hard problem! I’ve been working on it for a few days without success, and finally got something that works, but I still need to tinker with it.

My previous solution, which I might go back to, is to return the highest-scoring agent’s response (which would be something other than “please wait”, i.e. a megahal or alice response which might be nonsensical…) while other agents are still working on the answer, then push those time-consuming agents’ responses when they are finished, so that they get returned to the user eventually.

This is what I’ve got so far with the “Please wait” paradigm. The transcript was slightly edited for clarity. Satyagrahi is the bot, anekant is the interlocutor. The square brackets enclose the times:

[15:55:41] <@anekant> .wa when was Confucius born?
[15:55:43] <satyagrahi> Please wait for waagent to respond…
[15:55:46] <@anekant> ok
[15:55:48] <satyagrahi> Confucius->date of birth;551 BC;The year 551 BC was 2561 years ago.
[15:56:08] <@anekant> when was Laotze born?
[15:56:10] <satyagrahi> Please wait for waagent to respond…
[15:56:13] <@anekant> OK
[15:56:14] <satyagrahi> Laozi->date of birth;~~ 600 BC
[15:56:30] <@anekant> when was Pythagoras born?
[15:56:32] <satyagrahi> Please wait for waagent to respond…
[15:56:33] <@anekant> ...
[15:56:37] <satyagrahi> Pythagoras->date of birth;~~ 580 BC
[15:56:46] <@anekant> when was Socrates born?
[15:56:48] <satyagrahi> Please wait for waagent to respond…
[16:06:48] <satyagrahi> Socrates->date of birth;469 BC;The year 469 BC was 2479 years ago.

For the last question, I waited for the bot to push the response, and was rather surprised when it did, even though it took 10 minutes. I’m pretty sure this delay is in the irc wrapper, and can be shortened so that the bot responds when the wolfram alpha agent gets the response.

Of course, there are still other issues such as what to do when wolfram alpha doesn’t get the right response, and when the “Please wait…” pre-empts another agent that knows the response :) But it’s a start…