Other games have used natural language interactions before, says Rollo Carpenter, founder of Existor, the company behind the game, but these only use keywords to try to recognise what players are saying, he claims. “My script technology works by making predictions about what people will say,” he says. It then uses statistical analysis and fuzzy logic to try to find the best match for what was said against this vast number of predictions, before supplying the appropriate response.
An online game promoting the new movie Sherlock Holmes is offering players a new sort of gaming experience. The aim is to interview suspects - as Dr Watson or Holmes - to solve a robbery at the British Museum. Thanks to novel conversational “chatbots” embedded in the game, players can use natural language in their typed interrogations.
These predictions are grouped into possible phrases, rather than using stock sentences. This enables the system to deduce if you are referring to someone by name, or as “her”, or as someone’s daughter, says Carpenter. “It means you can ask your questions with enormously more variety.”
The system deduces if you are referring to someone by name, or as ‘her’, or as someone’s daughter
To solve the mystery, players must collect clues and use them to decide which questions they ask the virtual witnesses and suspects. How they choose to frame those questions affects their results, says Carpenter.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427395.000-chatbots-add-intelligence-to-sherlock-holmes-game.html, well spotted Jetty
