[MUD-Dev] Natural Language Generation

[Douglas Goodall]

Tiago Carita wrote:

> Any one knows examples of games that use natural language
> generation for NPCs??? And if yes was it convincing??

Alot of MUDs used (still use?) an Eliza based bot for one or a
couple of NPCs. It wasn't what I'd call convincing, but they fooled
quite a few people. I seem to recall a borg for DIKU style MUDs that
included a chatterbot as well. Whether it's worthwhile depends on
what you want to do. Chatterbots have already passed the Turing
test, but only for a) very limited topics and b) very short periods
of time. While I don't think they could convince most players that
they are "real," this does not mean they are useless.

Starship Titanic used chatterbots for most NPCs. It was not what I'd
call convincing, but I did find it fun to play (this is a minority
opinion judging by sales).

Once upon a time when I thought I might have something to contribute
to the game industry, I was working on a MUD that used a modified
version of Alice for NPCs. It wasn't convincing, but I thought it
worked well for things like directions and simple questions and
haggling and such. I modified Alice to search only a list of AIML
files to account for individual knowledge. For instance, if Bob is
an Elven shopkeeper in Anytown, he would have access to the AIML
files for Shopkeepers, Anytown, and Elves. This was a very handy way
to divide knowledge and maintain the ability to customize NPCs
without having to retype the same basic knowledge over and over. And
while I wouldn't enter any of my NPCs in a Turing competition (I
wasn't even using half the features of Alice, such as the <think>
tag), I felt they were better than the completely silent, completely
scripted, or completely random NPCs in other MUDs.

If you're a genius AI programmer, you could always reverse engineer
Brutus and the Erasmatron while combining and improving them. I'd do
it myself, but I'm not genius enough.

See hear:

  http://www.adventurecollective.com/reviews/starshiptitanic.htm

  http://www.alicebot.org/

  http://www.erasmatazz.com/

  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/080581986X/qid=1085167824/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/104-0262089-9395974?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
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