[MUD-Dev] Parlez vous NPC?

[Vadim Tkachenko]

Matt Chatterley wrote:

[skipped]

Well, it's said that everything new is long forgotten old - do you still
remember Eliza and Julia robot and derivatives?

> The NPC takes this sentence, and performs some basic tests on it,
> determining the subject matter, sub-topics, and the overall tone of the
> statement. This is the hard part. One simple way to go about it is by the
> use of topic and context dictionaries, a sample entry in which might be:
> 
> Weather:
>         Good:
>                 sunshine, dry, warm, pleasant, breezy
>         Bad:
>                 blustery, cold, showers, snow, blizzard, rain, sleet, hail
> 
> Thus, when our NPC is fed the sentence 'What do you think about the
> weather? All this snow makes me miserable, how about you?', it dismantles
> it into components:
> 
> what, do, you, think, about, the, weather (question)
> all, this, snow, makes, me, miserable
> how, about, you (question)
> 
> giving it three statements to deal with. Next we need to remove words
> which are of no value to us (for instance 'and', 'the', 'a' and so forth),
> leaving us with (writing from the NPCs point of view):
> 
> 1. (directed at me) think about weather (question)

Those robots usually replace any references to ... forgot the English
term for that (me, you, we, they; mine, my, your[s], his, her - what are
the names for these two groups?) with the opposite words, so the
response is likely to be

  - What makes you think that I think about the weather?

> 2. (directed at <player>) snow miserable (statement)
> 3. (directed at me) about (question)
> 
> This incidentally shows up one flaw in the system - simple statement
> portions (such as #3 above), are mangled very badly and may no longer be
> useful.

One of implementations I've seen, if exhausted the pattern analysis,
goes up the stack of saved pattern keywords and tries to restart the
conversation on the topic on the top of stack, like:

  - I don't know what to tell you about this, let's better talk about
the
    weather.

[skipped]

> There are still a thousand and one problems which I have deliberately not
> described (I wanted to put across the system outline in a basic fashion,
> plus I'm very tired). The obvious problems are actually amongst the hard
> ones to solve, and I await your blowtorches. :)

Can I say that all you use boils down to the rewriting grammars, too?

> Regards,
>         -Matt Chatterley
> Spod: http://user.super.net.uk/~neddy/spod/spod.html

--
Still alive and smile stays on,
Vadim Tkachenko <vt at freehold.crocodile.org>
--
UNIX _is_ user friendly, he's just very picky about who his friends are