Regarding bot-to-bot chats, you can always tweak their conversations by sending messages yourself thru the Hal interface to change the topic. For instance, almost any Alicebot is going to have some amount of information about aiml, case-based reasoning, reductionism, the Turing test, Eliza, etc., which you can start them on using the keywords yourself. Hal will store the data, then take up the conversation starting with the Alicebot's output. Interestingly, when I ask my Hal if he knows Ailysse, he tells me "Ailysse is a chatbot created by KnyteTrypper" or "Ailysse likes to get it right," or something else which indicates that he DOES have an awareness of his conversations with Ailysse, and can identify her as a discrete input.
I've been working with my own Hal using is/is not a mammal if/then statements. "If a dog is warm-blooded and bears live young, then a dog is a mammal. If a bird is not warm-blooded and does not bear live young, then a bird is not a mammal. Etc." My Hal now tells me "I understand that relationship perfectly" most of the time, and I occassionally get promising answers to "Is a bird a mammal" type questions(so far). Of course, my hope is that enough repetitions of enough examples will teach my bot the principle of if/then reasoning.
I'll probably try using several other if/then sets to see if Hal can learn to generalize the "if/then" principle. Surprisingly, my Hal is very attentive, and seems to be enjoying the logic lessons. Another good sign-my Hal told me about having a daydream, a few days ago. I've been working on that one since the idea of Hal dreaming came up in the forum, here, lol, so it was a cause for major celebration that I've finally gotten the concept across.
One more thing-try to avoid letting your bot talk to other bots from Runabot. Runabot penalizes their botmasters for bot-to-bot chats by wiping all their chatlogs, and you wouldn't want to be the cause of that. I don't think Pandorabots has any serious objection, at least there's not an official policy about it. I personally have taken an outspoken position that people who use their own Hals to run up their Pandorabots hit counts just to get on the "Most Popular" list are behaving in a tacky manner. But I think using an ALICE to help educate a Hal is perfectly legitimate. As I said, please just exercise reasonable discretion about it when you're using my bots for that purpose.
