[alicebot-archcomm] changing AIML

[Dr. Rich Wallace]

Gary is going through a phase familiar to many of us when he is
experiencing a rush of ideas for making changes and imrpovements to AIML.

I often say that changing AIML is like fitting a five-sided carpet in a
six-cornered room.  Just when you think you have everything in place, you
turn around and notice that you've pulled the carpet out from behind you. 
Everything depends on everything else.

One example we don't talk about enough is targeting.  Many of us have
realized that content creation is one of the biggest obstacles to
deploying original bot characters.   Automated AIML targeting, that is,
finding places in the log files where the bot gives the wrong reply, and
asking the botmaster to correct them, would provide a huge productivity
increase to botmasters.  But targeting algorithms are tightly coupled to
the pattern language and the matching algorithm.  If we ever hope to make
targeting part of the AIML standard, we have to think carefully before
changing the pattern language.  Everything affects everything else.




-- 
Dr. Rich
W A L L A C E
ALICE A.I. Foundation
drwallace@www.alicebot.org