Verbot

The Verbot (Verbal-Robot) is a popular [cite web
last = Joshua
first = Quittner
title = WHAT'S HOT IN BOTS
publisher = Time Magazine
date = 1997-12-08
url = http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,987519,00.html ] chatterbot program and Artificial Intelligence Software Development Kit (SDK) for the Windows platform and for the web and is based on a long history of AI experience and development.

Early Beginning

Virtual Personalities, Inc. traces its technology back to Dr. Michael Mauldin's work as a graduate student and post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University.

Historic Outline

In 1994, Dr. Michael ("Fuzzy") Mauldin, Founder of Lycos, Inc., developed a prototype Chatterbot, Julia, which competed in the internationally known Turing test, for the coveted Loebner Prize. The Turing Test matches computer scientist judges against machines to see if they can distinguish a computer from a real human. This prototype version was refined and developed, and in 1997, Dr. Mauldin and Peter Plantec, a clinical psychologist, formed Virtual Personalities, Inc. (now Conversive, Inc.) in order to create a virtual human interface that would incorporate real-time animation as well as speech and natural language processing. The initial release, a stand-alone virtual person called Sylvie, was beta-tested to the public. This release was well received, and finally, after several versions, the production release (deemed version 3) of the Verbally Enhanced Software Robot - or, Verbot was deployed in the Fall 2000.

* The grandfather of all Verbots is Rog-O-Matic, who although he could not talk, could and did explore a virtual world.
* Julia has been active on the internet in one form or another since 1989.
* A close cousin of Julia is Lycos, a robot that explores the world wide web and answers questions about it.
* Sylvie was the first Verbot with a face and a voice.

Beginnings

The Virtual Personalities story goes back to 1978, where Fuzzy was attending Rice University. Fascinated by the idea of Eliza, he proceeded to write a program called "PET" for his 8 kilobyte Commodore Pet Computer. PET included simple induction as a way to posit new information, and once managed the following deep observation:

Subject: I like my friend (later) Subject: I like food. PET: I have heard that food is your friend.

Fuzzy got so involved with this, that he majored in Computer Science and Minored in Linguistics (interestingly, the AI course at Rice could count as credit for either a computer science major OR for a Linguistics major).

Rogue

In the late seventies and early eighties, the hippest computer game at Universities was Rogue, an implementation of Dungeons and Dragons where a small "@" sign would descend 26 levels in a randomly created dungeon, fighting monsters, gathering treasure, and searching for the elusive "Amulet of Yendor". Fuzzy was one of four grad students who devoted a large amount of time to building a program called "Rog-O-Matic" that could and on several occasions did manage to retrieve the amulet and emerge victorious from the dungeon.

TinyMUD

So when in 1989, James Aspnes at Carnegie Mellon created the first TinyMUD (a descendent of MUD and AberMUD), Fuzzy was one of the first to create a computer player that would explore the text-based world of TinyMUD. But Fuzzy's first robot, Gloria, gradually accreted more and more linguistic ability, to the point that it could pass the "unsuspecting" Turing Test. In this version of the test, the human has no reason to suspect that one of the other occupants of the room is controlled by a computer, and so is more polite and asks less probing questions. The second generation of Fuzzy's TinyMUD robots was Julia, born on Jan. 8, 1990. Julia slowly developed as a more and more capable conversational agent, and assumed useful duties in the TinyMUD world, including tour guide, information assistant, note-taker, message-relayer, and even could play the card game hearts along with the other human players.

In 1991, the first Loebner Prize contest was held in Boston, Mass., and Julia was there. Although she only finished third, she was ranked by one judge as more human than one of the human confederates, winning a coveted certificate of humanness in the world's first restricted Turing test.

Julia continued to log into to various TinyMUD's and TinyMucks for the next seven years, and also chats with hundreds of people a month over the internet.

Lycos

Julia's job was to explore a virtual world comprised of pages of textual descriptions, with links between them, and to construct an internal map of that world and answer questions about it (including path information such as the shortest route from one room to another, and matching information, such as which rooms contained a certain kind of object or textual description).

It was therefore only a very short cognitive leap from Julia to Lycos, another robotic agent that explores a virtual world made of hyperlinked pages of text, and which answers questions about those pages.

Sylvie

In 1993 Peter Plantec was speculating in print that within two years we would see self animated, intelligent characters with personality and the ability to listen and talk. In 1995 Peter and Fuzzy discussed the possibility of putting Julia into some form of multimedia experiment. In 1997, Fuzzy and Peter formed Virtual Personalities, Inc. and developed Sylvie (the first Verbot), an evolved version of Julia which incorporated animation and synthetic voice.

Virtual Personalities

In 1998 Julia and Sylvie went on sale on the web. Shortly afterwards reports on various newsgroups and user forums began claiming that customers were having problems receiving their Verbot orders. Writers claimed they were either not getting their software and/or that their credit card accounts were being billed multiple times for the same order. Company representatives at first denied this but later admitted that their first "fulfillment contractor" had been replaced because of irregularities. Virtual Personalities, Inc subsequently changed their name to Conversive, who has stated that they are under different management and no longer use the same contractor for orders.

Verbots Today

The current Verbot 4 version was Created by Conversive (formerly Virtual Personalities, Inc.) and was released in 2004. In 2005 Version 4.1 of the Verbot Software was released with many feature enhancements and bug fixes, including built-in support for embedding C# code in outputs and conditionals. In Early 2006 Conversive launched Verbots Online allowing Verbot 4 users to upload their knowledge and show off their bots to the world.

ee also

* Turing test
* Loebner prize
* Chatterbot
* List of Chatterbots

Notes

External links

* [http://www.lazytd.com/lti/julia/ Julia]
* [http://www.conversive.com Conversive]
* [http://www.verbots.com Verbots]
* [http://www.verbots.com/verbotsonline.php Verbots Online]
* [http://verbots.sourceforge.net/ Open Source (GPL) Verbots SDK]