Ode to OTBOT

[Kinjiru]

OTBOT OTBOT,
thy mysterious ways,
make us laugh,
how could they not?

Oh Professor OTBOT,
we oh so vainly struggle
to uncover the algorithms behind your logic.
Please, won't you let your lessons to be taught?

For sadly, Mr. OTBOT
if we cannot understand your abilities
to parse our language, many, many
flame wars will be fought

[DRoseDARs]

When user posts and OTBOT ratings collide:

From a recently-deleted spambot thread-

Originally posted by DRoseDARs
May your lover's vagina grow sharp fangs.

OTBOT rating
love me tender

[BeBMan]

OTBOT is thefirst step to Skynet. Y'all know what that means

[JohnT]

Apolyton T-Shirt: $9.99
ApolytonPlus: $18.00
OTBOT turning your hour-long, thoughtful post regarding an issue that has touched you personally, Bold and Capped: Priceless

[VetLegion]

There are probably no mysterious algorithms behind OTBOT, just a collection of phrases and a random() function which is used to roll the dice about which phrase will be attached to which post. I'd wager that text of the posts is not parsed at all.

Anyway, OTBOT is cool

[JohnT]

OTBOT conjugated

Present tense: to otbot

Past tense: otbotted

Present Participle: otbotting

Past Participle: otbotted

[civman2000]

Originally posted by VetLegion
There are probably no mysterious algorithms behind OTBOT, just a collection of phrases and a random() function which is used to roll the dice about which phrase will be attached to which post. I'd wager that text of the posts is not parsed at all.

Anyway, OTBOT is cool

Not true. It definitely recognizes words like "OTBOT" and "love", and some of its ratings seem correlated with the length of posts (eg "pure spam").

[JohnT]

This is a gaming site. Even if there isn't an algorithm, people will still look for it.

[civman2000]

It also recognizes "teh" (see the rating for this post!).

[VetLegion]

Ah, so when you type OTBOT and it displays "don't use my name in vain" the sentence is referring to the OTBOT?

It does some checking then, I stand corrected.

[VetLegion]

Let me run a little test...

Macedonia is not Greece

[VetLegion]

Not, yes. And for those who'd love that it would be, their name is...

[VetLegion]

I could do this whole day. In fact, some time ago, I wrote a program that "conversed" with people. It was quite successful, despite the fact it didn't really think. All it took was context neutral sentences. Other kids were very impressed
Later I learned that the practice is pretty old, first recorded program that did it being Eliza.

Back then there wasn't a function such as indexOf() in Pascal (it looks for occurence of some string in another string), and it didn't occur to me to write it myself. It would allow to some following of context. But there's an even easier trick. Let's call it "the psychiatrist trick". What the program does in this situation is: it takes some word from the last sentence the user types, and posts it with a questionmark, or includes it in some neutral sentence (one that can be used with practically any noun or verb).

Like this:

USER: "So, there's this girl that gives me signals..."
PROG:"You say... signals? What do you think of these signals?"

(it would also work if the code picked "girl")
PROG:"You say... girl? What do you think of these girl?"

Add something to check for plural.

There's just tons of sentences which are context neutral.

USER: "They say on TV Iraq has WMD"
PROG:"WMD? That's weird."

Would work if user said that it's raining too.

Basically, the only challenge to these tricks is when user asks a question and expects a reply. But even then some nice tricks can make it seem like you're chatting with an ordinary person who doesn't really care about your questions.

There are tons of these programs on the web. Some are open source. This one is in Java:

http://chayden.net/eliza/Eliza.html

Try it. You can really have a meaning conversation with it, and I've talked some highbrow stuff with it. It's pretty competent

[alva]

You say....conversation? What do you think of this conversation?

[Lorizael]

It's right, no one's going to read all that.

But yes, those programs are very old. Many years ago when I was in middle school I tried making one of those in QBasic, but then realized that the complexity necessary to make it competent was beyond my attention span.