CTWR 518 - Interactive Writing

Ikkyu was a Buddhist monk in medieval Japan. I propose to make a bot of him, using his short haiku-form poems to respond to keywords that come up in chat conversation with users.

As the Ikkyu bot would be hosted by a “bot-hosting” service, there is no attempt to fool or mislead the user. Rather, this bot would serve as a font of wisdom and mirth, characteristics of Ikkyu’s work we have in translation.

Ikkyu would be characterized as a historical personage, verging on the spiritual. His tradition doesn’t diefy their famous dead, but his wisdom persists give him a sort of life after death. Teaching would be his function.

His subject matter would be matters spiritual, particular to his experience – Buddhism and the tenants of that faith. Ikkyu is particularly interesting in this regard, because he enjoyed observing the tenants of Buddhism in the breach.

But starting with the stock bot gives me a lot of work to clean out the supplied phrases. Every basic AIML character using the template knows who George Bush is, where France is. I could delete all of that I suppose, and I probably should, looking over the religion.aiml file – it’s not in keeping with the character to have Ikkyu answer a question about the Ten Commandments.

Which begs a question – do I want to imagine what his personality is, supplying non-haiku answers? Sitting down for an unguided experience, entering conversation with him, I’m tempted to fill in the common responses: what would Ikkyu reply to “What’s up?” I removed some of the “I’m chatting on the internet” lines that are definitely distant from medieval monkhood. For now, it’s four lines of poetry.

Talk to him about confusion, safety, ask him what he’s up to.

Chat with Ikkyu.