Minerealm Community Forums

The following is written for programmers. Other may have trouble understanding what I'm taking about.

Help Bot currently uses the Levenschtein algorithim (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance) to calculate similarity between sentences and determine a proper response. The problem is that the algorithm doesn't work well on whole sentences; It's primary application is recognizing individual words. When used on a whole sentence there is far too much room for misidentification.

If Intelli will take some advice, this thing can get fixed quickly.

1st) Use the Damerau-Levenshtein algorithm instead. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damerau%E2 ... n_distance) This algorithm improves recognition at lower distance maximums. (btw-I can't believe they named these things. We used to just call it the spell-check algorithm.)

2nd) The algorithm needs to have 2 seperated layers: word recognition and sentence recognition.

The first step is to parse the sentence into individual words. Run the algorithm on the letters in each word seperately. This should result in words like "bake" and "BiKe" being identified as the same. It's ok, that's normal.

Once the words have been identified, look for any keywords like "realm" "help" "bones" and a plethora of swears. Looking for the appropriate keywords will prevent "How do I bake?" from being misidentified as "How do I fly?"

If any keywords are present run the algorith again, but this time on the words in the sentence. For instance: "This cake is dry." should only be 1 substitution from "This cake is yellow." (substituting the word yellow for the word dry)

Once correct sentences are identified, respond appropriately.

3rd) Use a variable-length for maximum distance based on the length of the word/sentence. that's just common sense really.

4th) You're going to need a pretty large bank of words/sentences before the Help Bot is at full functionality. This is unavoidable, time consuming, and will never stop growing. I hope you realized that when you started this project.

5th) Don't hook Help Bot back up to Cleverbot. The purpose of Help Bot is to dissiminate specific information only when needed. One of the purposes of Cleverbot is to respond to all incoming stimulous. These are mutually exclusive goals. The fact that Cleverbot has additional goals only makes the issue more complicated and less useful.

Well Intelli, I hope you take some advice from an old-timer. I would really like to see Help Bot live up to it's potential.

EDIT:

Intelli wrote:The help bot was not hooked up to cleverbot...

I just assumed it was hooked up to cleverbot or something like it. The learning/responses were very similar.

The help bot was not hooked up to cleverbot...

Intelli wrote:The help bot was not hooked up to cleverbot...

Do it. Let the lulz be free.

Cogohst wrote:

Intelli wrote:The help bot was not hooked up to cleverbot...

Do it. Let the lulz be free.

*Intelli does it*

Next day: Intelli: Where is everyone?

Kerovon: They were all banned for making help bot swear...

It should probably be removed altogether, it's nice to have, but not only does it clutter chat too much with everyone talking, but some of our members are not mature enough to behave with something like this.

I haven't 'been on much since the addition of the help bot, but every time i get on, i see many people asking the bot really stupid, and immature questions like "HELP BOT CAN I HAZ S*X?".

IMO we were better off as we were before, without it, where you had to ask a human what to do, and not a machine. There are many tutorials at spawn city, for example cirjohn's well written tut under the 420 store, the one in the trade room, at spawn, etc, and most of the time when a player asks a question in chat, they get an answer.

tehbomb wrote:It should probably be removed altogether, it's nice to have, but not only does it clutter chat too much with everyone talking, but some of our members are not mature enough to behave with something like this.

I haven't 'been on much since the addition of the help bot, but every time i get on, i see many people asking the bot really stupid, and immature questions like "HELP BOT CAN I HAZ S*X?".

IMO we were better off as we were before, without it, where you had to ask a human what to do, and not a machine. There are many tutorials at spawn city, for example cirjohn's well written tut under the 420 store, the one in the trade room, at spawn, etc, and most of the time when a player asks a question in chat, they get an answer.

I have to agree with this. It should be disabled, or made to respond privately.
However, Intelli has told me that making it respond privately would defeat the purpose...
...Is the purpose not to help the new players? The rest of the players don't need to know what it says.
The only problem is other players don't know if the help bot has responded, so you could just make it say, 'help bot has responded'.

mitchie151 wrote:

tehbomb wrote:It should probably be removed altogether, it's nice to have, but not only does it clutter chat too much with everyone talking, but some of our members are not mature enough to behave with something like this.

I haven't 'been on much since the addition of the help bot, but every time i get on, i see many people asking the bot really stupid, and immature questions like "HELP BOT CAN I HAZ S*X?".

IMO we were better off as we were before, without it, where you had to ask a human what to do, and not a machine. There are many tutorials at spawn city, for example cirjohn's well written tut under the 420 store, the one in the trade room, at spawn, etc, and most of the time when a player asks a question in chat, they get an answer.

I have to agree with this. It should be disabled, or made to respond privately.
However, Intelli has told me that making it respond privately would defeat the purpose...
...Is the purpose not to help the new players? The rest of the players don't need to know what it says.
The only problem is other players don't know if the help bot has responded, so you could just make it say, 'help bot has responded'.

Most people who are regulars and actually are active for this issue haven't "Logged in for the first time" . But today for lulz, I logged in as "MysteryForumGuy" And it popped up on my screen for me to enter my email, and then a few seconds later in yellow text, For me to type help. I think it should do stuff like what i just said, but repeat it untill you do it. It would be much more effective.

I personally think that It should be disabled until it is complete.

Help bot boots up automatically when no admins/mods are on, bans wrong-doers, keeps logs for 30 minutes before and after bans.

^ problem solved.

Bow down to the glorious Help Bot! It is Our Saviour!