Bot News
Talking with Billy and Daisy

By Brian Proffitt

As most people know, the way we learn as human beings is not often understood by scientists and philosophers alike. A philosopher friend of mine is always making my head reel with thoughts of subjective nature and phenomenology. He's fun to hang out with anyway.

One way to learn about us is to examine other things and see how they learn. Chat bots are one avenue of exploration.

Greg Leedberg is a college freshman who is seeking out the truth behind one of life's mysteries by creating not one but two bots--each with a different learning model.

The first bot is Billy, which is pretty standard as bots go. Billy is a keyword-parser bot preprogrammed with a set number of response phrases. According to Leedberg, Billy's learning abilities make him an atypical bot. Billy has the ability to "remember vocabulary and phrases, rather than just spitting back preprogrammed responses," according to the documentation on the Billy site.

The keyword-parser also does more than break down sentences into individual words; grammar patterns are recognized and utilized for responses.

The other bot in Leedberg's stable is Daisy. Daisy is unique in that she has no preprogrammed responses built in. Everything she replies with is learned from a conversation with you.

For ease of use, one memory file of a conversation with Leedberg is included, just to get things moving along, but Leedberg recommends starting with an empty memory file to watch how Daisy learns from scratch.