Banapana » Aqua Teen Hunger Force

IF and AI?

troped — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:12:05 +0000

I took a long sojourn into the history of interactive fiction (IF) with my launching pad being the stunning revelations unearthed by Andy Balo over at waxy in regards to the never-completed Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure sequel. But after reading that, and poking around the archives and playing a few great examples of IF, I started wondering why more hasn’t been done to advance the interface of these games? Why not incoporate more AI?

From what I can gather, all these old text adventure games are mostly written in something called Z-code and generally speaking, the only way to access most of them is through a Java applet on the web or one of several free downloadable interpreters; unfortunately, all of which choose to exactly emulate the old terminal style screens. On large screens, it’s terribly unpleasant to read. So, my first thought was, why hasn’t the interface been updated to take advantage of the slick typography of modern computers? I think people would take more interest in some of the newer, award-winning fiction created, if this were the case.

And the other thing that I found frustrating is that the commands and command structure hasn’t changed the least in 20 years. My Master Shake bot on AIM can do more with regular English than any of these games.¹ Every time I said “look calendar” and the program responded “I don’t know what you mean,” I found myself wondering, why not? In fact, my bot knows a few things about people and places from the Aqua Teen Hunger Force world. I don’t think it’s hard at all to see that interactive fiction could be greatly improved with some simple AI. I’m going to take a shot at an interactive short story using just ALICE. I think with the right variables (and Jquery interface), it will be possible to build a much smarter interactive fiction.

You can see for yourself and talk to him on AIM at mast3rshak3bot. ↩

George Wins Loebner Prize

admin — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 11:03:02 +0000

Well, George and his programmer, Rollo Carpenter, won the prize. This is a bit of an upset for those who follow the competition; Alice, a fairly well-known chatbot created by Dr. Richard Wallace has grabbed the top prize in the contest for the last three years running. However, no bot yet has won the gold medal for convincing a judge that it is a human. While ALICE is based on the popular AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), the Jabberwacky language appears to be proprietary technology.

[Blatant personal plug: I have my own version of an AIML bot running on AIM. He's based on the popular cartoon character Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. You can talk to him at his AIM address: mast3rshak3bot. WARNING: The character in the cartoon is hardly polite. Niether is the bot.]

It’s all about Bots!

admin — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 02:07:07 +0000

It’s all about bots this week for me! My mind had already been going down this track for a month or so when low and behold Wired runs an article in the magazine about SmarterChild — a bot I’ve been playing with quite a bit. While investigating the matter I also stumbled across this article Wired published back in September about bots that can be used to prank people. Of course I did that right away and pranked my good friend Mike. Unfortunately, he’s been listening to me rant about these bots for a while now and he wasn’t biting when the bot knocked at the door. But the rest of you watch out! And, of course, my investigation wouldn’t be through if I didn’t have a bot of my own. The first one I set up was an ALICE bot, driven by the PHP Program known as Program E. (I liked it’s old name PHPillip better). it was created by Paul Rydell and is now maintained by some good folks over at SourceForge. This first bot is the Oracle and is an attempt at making a bot that is a kind of super-fancy magic eightball that will predict your future, provide fortunes and things of that nature. Don’t get too interested in him yet. I only put him up this week and there’s a lot of AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) work to be done yet.

The second one is a chatbot that I set up with the guys at RunABot. I was very excited to find these guys because I’m not enough of Perl programmer to be able to create an AIM interface for ALICE. (Moreover, I only have a shared server which can’t handle running a daemon or whatever those chatbots for AIM run on) This bot is an attempt to re-create one of my favorite cartoon characters right now, Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. He’s rude, he’s crude and so’s his bot. You can chat with him by IMing mast3rshak3bot on AIM. He’s mostly complete for conversation, but his personality is evolving. All in all it will likely take about 10,000 entries for me to get him where I want. Better get to work!