[alicebot-style] For the record

[Dirk Scheuring]

 This is just to add the following notes to the Alicebot archive records:

1. Alan Turingīs "Imitation Game" - a man pretending to be a woman, a woman pretending to be a man, a computer pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman -, is interpreted by this writer as being all about fictional characters. Before attempting to write a bot that is supposed to pass as an "intelligent" - as in "human-like intelligence" - being, this writer thinks that itīs a good idea to study how fictional characters that, by their audiences, are percieved as being "intelligent" (e.g. Hamlet, Lolita, Donald Duck, HAL 9000) are created. 

2. Creating consistent fictional characters is not easy, and the skills involved differ significantly from the skills involved in creating a computer program (although the roots of both  fiction writers and computer programmers can be traced back to Aristotele). To this writer, there is no reason to believe that future, technically advanced versions of the bot engine and/or writing 2.000.000 categories for a bot will make the botīs "character" somehow "emerge", without the botmaster having to learn anything about fiction writing.

3. Nobody ever went and "wrote a character". In order to make it work, a character has to be embedded in a larger context, which is called a "story". 

4. One of the basic rules of storytelling is: "Without plot, there is no character". So, in order to create a convincing bot character, the botmistress has to figure out how to integrate the notion of "plot" with the botīs overall construction. One obvious way of doing this is to use the <pattern>*</pattern> category (that gets used in case the bot doesnīt "understand" anything of the clientīs input) to advance the plot.

5. Besides "plot" and "character", many fiction writers also find it useful to look at their stories from a "theme" and a "genre" perspective. Genre, plot, theme, and character, taken together, are often refered to as the "four dimensions" needed to successfully define a storyīs "scope" (i.e. what is and what is not "part of the story"). Without the ability to limit the scope, botmasters quickly find that conversations between bot and client tend to become "n-dimensional", and therefore, unpredictable and unmanagable.

6. To counteract "n-dimensionality", todayīs botmistresses try to make their creations as one-dimensional as possible. Almost all material encoded in the output of the numerous bots found on the Internet can be rated as "genre-only". There _are_ attempts to encode "theme" and "character", but itīs usually done without an overarching strategy/storyform, which quickly leads to the inconsistencies that have often been noted ("bot schizophrenia"). Nobody (except, of course, for this writer) seems to believe that "plot" has anything to do with this at all.


Dirk