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ALICE Community Grows

By Brian Proffitt

Users of the chat bot ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) will be happy to note that work on the open source bot project is proceeding at a very strong pace, thanks to the efforts of a very dedicated developer and user community.

ALICE, the invention of Dr. Richard Wallace, has gained quite a following in recent months, particularly after winning the 2000 Loebner Prize, a contest held annually to determine the most human-like computer software.

Although no bot has ever won the grand prize for being "the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's", the annual bronze prizes are awarded to those bots with the most human qualities, which ALICE certainly has.

ALICE is constructed in Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML), a derivative of XML. The current version of ALICE, Program D, has been compiled in Java, the second such implementation in this language. Both of these factors make tinkering with ALICE very easy, of course, but it is the third unique point about ALICE that really draws a crowd of developers.

ALICE is one of the few sophisticated chat bots that is made available under the GNU Public License. Under the license, both ALICE and its source code are freely available to anyone who desires to use it. Another popular software released under this type of license, for example, is the Linux operating system.

Being an open source application is certainly one of the reasons why such a strong following has sprung up around ALICE. But there are other motivations, according to Joost van Brug, Webmaster of the Alicebot Users and Developers Forum.

Joost, an interaction designer at a design agency, first built the site as a development tool. "I'm a member of the alicebot@hotbot.com and I wanted a better platform for developers," he explained. "Site creation is my job, so I installed a forum and it grew into the site as it is now."

When asked why he thinks ALICE is such a popular development project, Joost replied, "I think it's the romantic (sci-fi) idea of a humanlike computer.

" The amount of development levels are great, too," Joost added. "For newbies, AIML is a good start. For the developers, more involved Java or C is the next step. The best part is that it's impossible to do a project like this on your own. Now you can still be a part of something huge."

When posed with the same question about ALICE's attractiveness, Wallace, who also serves as a moderator at the Alicebot Forum site, echoed Joost's comments--with some detail.

"The simplicity of AIML. I always say, if you can create a web page then you can create a chat robot in AIML. If you know three tags of HTML, I can teach you three tags of AIML and get you started as a botmaster," Wallace said.

"Programming is not necessarily the most important skill for botmasters. We want the bot content to be lively, humorous, entertaining and fun," he added. "An English major who can write a grammatically correct sentence might make a better botmaster than a programmer immersed in engineering details."

Wallace also cited other key factors that lend to the popularity of ALICE.

"On another level, developers are attracted to the minimalist design of ALICE and AIML. The algorithms, the stimulus-response model, the ease of portability to new platforms--all contribute to the adoption of AIML," Wallace explained.

"In other cases, the decision is simply one of cost. Would you rather
pay $50,000 plus consulting fees for a closed-source natural language
program, or download an open source one free from the net?" he queried.

Though ALICE is now a part of the open source community, he has definite plans on where he wants to take ALICE in the future.

"Our vision of ALICE is evolving," Wallace explained. "Where once we saw millions of independent bots linked to individual web sites, the developers now envision a single unified knowledge base, linked by a Napster-style file-sharing protocol.

"The idea is, if your local bot doesn't know the answer to a question, it contacts its neighbor bots to see if they have the matching AIML. If not, they ask their neighbors, and so on. In this way the client has access not just to the knowledge of one bot, but potentially to an entire worldwide community of cooperating bots," Wallace elaborated.

Which will certainly give the ALICE community a worth goal to reach for.