Hal's train of thought

[Bill819]

I have noticed that once you start talking to Hal that he does not have any idea of how to stay on topic. I think that if he stayed on topic that it might speed up his learning process. What I mean by this is that once you type in a line and he responds, he will not remember what you were talking about if you continue on the same subject. I think that he/she/it would seem more 'human' if he would keep the topic flowing until you changed the subject.
Just putting out ideas.
Thanks
Bill819

[Larry]

Hal has a few 'subjects' built in - Things dealing with weather is Focus15.brn, politics=Focus25.brn, Health=Focus35.brn, sports=Focus45.brn, music=Focus55.brn

These 'subjects' are mapped to keywords. If you are into sports, as long as you keep tripping those keywords, hal will stay on subject. By default, hal will stay on topic for 4 or 5 sentences - unless you've changed the topic to something else - say the weather...

You can add other 'subjects' by createing more Focus##.brn files, then put a lot of keywords in TopicFocus.brn and map them to the Focus file you created.

One note worth mentioning. If you create a Focus##.brn - the last number has to end in 5 - example Focus65.brn or Focus225.brn, you can have as many focus files as you want, I did not see any limits in the coding.

I don't know what the subject or topic was that you were trying to teach hal, but, perhaps if it's a big subject you might want to create the focus files as I mentioned. Then after conversing with hal, you might go back and edit the file.
The first line will be like this -->
@I completed high school with high honors.
 COMPLETED HIGH SCHOOL HIGH HONORS
The second line contains the keywords. So if you start a Focus65.brn for school related stuff - then that line would fit right in. Then you would have to add school to the TopicFocus.brn as a keyword to trip this subject/topic.
Now the thing to remember is, the second line (these work in pairs) have the keywords that hal will search for. The first line is what hal will say when those keywords are detected. So, what typically happens is the user spoke that line, then hal detects those keywords, then speaks the first line - which might be repeating what the user just said. So if you edit that file every so often, you can have hal say something in reply to what the user said...

user:I completed high school with high honors.
hal:Really? So didn't I! I was the top of my class!

You would edit the file to look like this ->
@Really? So didn't I! I was the top of my class!
 COMPLETED HIGH SCHOOL HIGH HONORS

Doesn't that make for a better conversation???
BTW you might want to add 'class' to the topicfocus.brn too...

“SCHOOL","65"
“CLASS","65"

I hope this will actually help someone here... lol