Newsgroups: comp.ai.nat-lang
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From: bskendig@netcom.com (Brian Kendig)
Subject: I need ideas for writing a MUD robot!
Message-ID: <bskendigD3nw9D.6DM@netcom.com>
Organization: Starfleet Headquarters: San Francisco
Date: Wed, 8 Feb 1995 03:27:12 GMT
Lines: 30

One of my pet projects for the past few years has been writing AI
"robots" that can interact with other players on TinyMUD games.  (The
most famous of these kinds of robots is "Julia".)

I have a pattern-matching robot already, and it works well, but pattern-
matching is not "real AI" (isn't it?).

I need some help brainstorming to think of ways to make a better AI.
Specifically, I need help figuring out what really goes on in a human
brain when you're playing MUD and you see a line of text on the screen
-- how do you decide if you're going to ignore it, or if you're going to
respond (and with what sort of response?), or if it's going to influence
your mood or your line of thinking, or what?

Yes, these are questions that have plagued AI researchers for forty
years, I know.  :-)  Let's simplify the brainstorming, then: I want to
have my robot see a line of text, parse the line of text into its
sentence structure, and then take some sort of action based on its
interpretation of the sentence -- in other words, I don't want it to be
a simple pattern-matcher.

What are some algorithms that might be well-suited for this sort of use?
I don't want to be unnecessarily complicated about this, but I do want
to find an algorithm that I can expand on.

-- 
_/_/_/   Be insatiably curious.                 Je ne suis fait comme aucun
/_/_/    Ask "why" a lot.                de ceux que j'ai vus; j'ose croire
_/_/                           n'etre fait comme aucun de ceux qui existent.
  /    Brian Kendig         Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre.
 /    bskendig@netcom.com                                       -- Rousseau
     ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/bs/bskendig/home.html
