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Michael McCourt
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Joined: 01/17/2007
It's funny you bring this up

It's funny you bring this up because recently I'd been thinking about the illusion of conversation in games. It sounds like your parser allows you to set up "facts" and ask questions about the facts. Can it also respond to situations like:

Mary gave John the book.

John gave Frank the book.

and then ask,

Who has the book?

Would it know that the book had been given to a different person?

Can you ask: Who had the book first?

Lately I've been playing Seaman and have been pretty unimpressed with it as a simulation of conversation. It's mostly him asking questions with an expected set of responses and playing back whatever branch of the tree the player's response lands on.

Do you remember Eliza? That was also full of pat phrases that just took key words from the player's input and spat them back. I wonder how far we've come in 20 years and why it hasn't shown up in games. Maybe the collective "we" doesn't really want to have a conversation that falls into the uncanny valley just before artificially generated language code gets good enough to pass a Turing test.

Your stuff sounds interesting, it is a shame there's no demo of it.

Have you ever played with a 20 Questions ball? That's a pretty creepy display simulated intuiting, if not conversation, but the way it works must be really interesting as far as establishing and elimintating dataset possibilities.

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