[MMasterSK]

Uh oh .. CirJohn you remind me of myself when I was on high school .. I was so excited about everything I learned that I wanted to share it with everyone

I don't know how the bot is working, but based on the questions and its responds I would say that there is easier logic used. Probably it is just looking for specific words in sentences with some basic logic (probably regexp or similar). But that's just a guess and its really hard to say if its really bad AI or really good answer machine I doubt it is learning anything except for some logs that it probably creates.

But I like your excitement about this topic .. keep it up! :-)

[GaidinBDJ]

How about breaking Help Bot up into two uses. Basic FAQs (Where do I build, what are credits, etc.) being separated from actual info. Narrowing the pool of basic questions would mean the patterns could be more specific, and wouldn't require as many cycles to try to interpret a wider array of questions.

At the same time implement a hook so Help Bot could be specifically invoked.

So it would respond to "Where can I build?" (and the others) with the usual response, but stuff like recipes could be requested by saying "Bot, how do I make X" or "Bot, what are channels?". It would let the basic questions get answered using a smaller range of patterns, and only need to go into more intensive recognition when specifically invoked or it falls through the basics.

It's been *mumbletenyearsmumble* since I've had to do any serious programming, but the basic idea with heuristics then was to catch the easy ones early to save cycles.