CTWR 518 - Interactive Writing

At first I started with the annotated A.L.I.C.E. template, and spent some time changing around Rimbaut’s responses to the stock questions that were in the library, but this method proved to be highly unstable, as any wording other than exactly what they had written down would trigger a response to a question which I had not programmed for. Thus even though I would suggest the topics for discussion, such as Religion, they would still not trigger any of the right responses unless someone asked something like “Do you believe in Mahomet?” Mind you, if they asked, “Do you believe in Mohammed, the system would spit back something else entirely. I gather that since we are not supposed to make the perfect bot, we are just supposed to get the experience of what it is like to try. Well, I feel like I am standing at the top of a Black Diamond slope after taking one snowboarding lesson – I don’t have the courage to go down, but there’s no other way to get back home.

I thought that it wouldn’t be that difficult (well, relatively speaking) to program a poet bot, especially a symbolist poet bot. The phrases used in Rimbaud’s poetry are so colorful, and touch on such a wide array of images while not being too specific about the exact subject matter that I thought I could program in some good keywords that would trigger responses culled from the work of the wunderkind poet. I am still working on this. I started a new one from scratch, but I haven’t quite figured out how to program it with keywords, rather than phrases. Maybe more research will divulge this fact. More to come.