[alicebot-archcomm] The High Cost of Standards

[Dirk Scheuring]

Sure, Rich - it costs something to maintain a standard. It also costs
something to /not/ maintain a standard. It's reasonable for any agent
to choose the option which is less expensive. But - which /is/ the
less expensive option here, and for whom?

You're obviously unsure about this. One piece of evidence for that is
your recent email, dated sep. 13, 2006, where you wrote: "I think it
is important to pay attention to the standard." I wrote back: "Why is
it important?" You didn't reply.

My question was in no way meant to be provocative: I honestly don't
know why it would be important for me to follow an AIML standard,
other than to not leave you to your own devices. I'm still unwilling
to do that, since I still fell like I owe you something, for inventing
this language. Every time I see a "Roll Call" message with no, or few,
responses, I'm thinking: "Poor Rich - how could I help him get more
attention?" Apart from that, I can see no reason not to ignore it. In
the general case, I think that people who use "Chairman" as their sig,
but weasel out every time somebody asks them a question that pertains
to the organization they are supposed to be the chairman of, are
beyond ridiculous.

And I'm not alone. Many research institutions and  companies,
including Pandorabots, have openly or covertly developed extensions to
AIML, which they are happily using. And why not? For anybody who's not
dependent on data interchange, standards have severe disadvantages:
the need for a strong leadership, requirements for updating them, and
increased overhead for tools and management.

Even your alicebot.org is promoting the 'roll your own' strategy, as
evidenced in the "Embrace & Extend" documentation for the <learn> and
<eval> tags that only work for Pandorabots users [1]. So what's up? Do
you need help which we could possibly give you, or are you just
playing?

Dirk

[1] http://www.alicebot.org/Embrace.html

On 9/21/06, Dr. Rich Wallace <drwallace at alicebot.org> wrote:
> Although I can appreciate everyone's interest in developing the AIML
> standard, it is worth pointing out that the AI Foundation is still small
> compared with other standards organizations,and the AIML business is small
> compared with other programming languages.  This I think is the main
> factor holding back the development of our standard.
>
> One standards process I am familiar with is Common Lisp. There have been a
> number of attempts to establish a standardization process for Common Lisp
> after it has been officially published as an ANSI standard, but none of
> them have really taken off due to lack of funding.
> The original ANSI standardization was very costly and very time consuming.
> According to
> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/15248a1b11c5a603 it took
> nearly 10 years and at least $400K.
>
> During that 10 years, there were numerous large and small companies (some
> of which are no longer in business, or no longer in the Lisp business) who
> had a stake in the Common Lisp standard.   After that 10 year period, the
> Common Lisp standard has been pretty much frozen in place because no
> companaies or governments have stepped forward to pay for the
> organizational effort.
>
> It is true that Common Lisp is a much bigger language than AIML, but our
> group is not really operating at the same level of funding as an ANSI or a
> W3C.
>
>
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