What do bored VB programmers do?

What do bored VB programmers do in their spare time? Well, here ya go! Here's a little something I made on MY spare time. What about you?:)

I like to argue with stupid people on chit chat personally :rolleyes:

ooo... thats fun too;)

If chatting with people is fun, wouldn't it be even more fun to build a program to do exactly that? :)

that would take the fun out of it :p

A program that chats for you isn't easy to make..

You know their ar two many problems with the grammar and sometimes no sense the sentences do make. ;)

To be serious, the real problem is to scan the incoming text and answer as neccessary ... my last try to code such a program was years ago, maybe I could do it better now *hehe* *goes coding* :)

The famous one was Elisa (I think that's the right spelling). The problem with it is comprehension of the subject matter - you can make a relatively simple program that just uses keywords to select an automated response (for example if your input contained the word 'aunt' it might respond "tell me more about your family"). To have something that can hold a decent conversation, though, you need to be able to ask questions about the conversation so far and have the correct responses given.

The first problem with this is that although the input is one-dimensional (a linear array of characters), there is implied structure in the sentence depending on things like word order. For instance there is a common structure of subject-verb-object, and every sentence contains a noun phrase and a verb phrase. This kind of information is better represented as a tree structure, or something else.

Essentially in order to tackle the problem properly, you need a knowledge base, and you need to be able to add facts to that knowledge base as the conversation proceeds, so that the facts can be retrieved when they are asked for.

Well anyway it's a very complicated subject, and I don't really think VB is the appropriate language to be developing knowledge based systems in :)

I had this program once that took keywords and later used them in sentences. For example, If you used You're dogs name (lets say Spot), it would later talk about Spot. It was a really cool little thing, but I can't seem to find it again. I think I got it at download.com if you want to try to find it. Don't ask me for the name... if forgot;)

Bored programmers should check out my "It Lives!!!"
Thread. In fact, not-bored programmers should check it
out too. Its what I'VE done in my boredom =).

Z.

Hey, can you gimme the address of that thread? ;)

I once made something like that in a game. It was an NPC that looked like a player; he asked you if you wanted to chat, and it had a very simple way to talk, but the sentences were arranged in such a way that it always looked good :)