Python Chatbot

This week, I have a really fun assignment of creating a chat bot in Python.  When I took 1110, I spent probably a whole day looking at different chat bots online and watching the funny videos (Are you a unicorn?), so I thought I had a pretty good idea on how the program should behave.  I also knew the basics about the Turing Test and that ultimate goal of the Loebner Contest is to create a computer program that is indistinguishable from a human.  My initial thoughts were, that the computer would require huge amounts of knowledge to accomplish this, along with some really good speech patterns.

Today, in our Java class, we watched a TED talk on Stephen Wolfram .  In the video he shows the Wolfram Alpha application, which appeared to be way smarter than Google!  It has an incredible amount of information about math, physics, science, history, tons of other things, and even linguistics.  I say it's smarter than Google, because the Wolfram is not just producing a list of web pages (half of them spam) for the user to hunt through to find the information they requested.  The Wolfram contains highly detailed, specific information about the subjects.  - like a universe size reference book.  I thought, man, if anything could pass a Turing Test, surely that thing has the ability.

But, after second thought, no... not really.  First of all, no human has all the knowledge of that thing!  It also occurred to me that "book knowledge" might help a computer appear more human like, but it's still missing something critical.  I guess compassion and understanding would be the main thing a chat bot needs to pass a Turing Test.  It's not just responding to answers with knowledge, it needs to respond with feeling and emotion.  It would need to be programmed to have beliefs on things that are good and bad and moral.  Just being able to figure out if someone is talking about something they have negative feelings about or positive feelings about could take a chat bot pretty far.  One variable that will play in the chat bot's favor is that so much emotion is already removed when communicating via text, and people continue to increase their amount of text based communications.  I can't even count how many times I've gotten email replies that I swear could have came from a robot.  I ask a multiple choice question and I get "yes" for a reply.  #soAnnoying.  Anyways, I'm sure there are lots of smart people out there working on chat bots with feelings and moral standards.  :)

I'm trying to program my chat bot to respond in a peaceful state of  zen to hide the fact that she has no emotion.  <3