Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity

A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), also referred to as Alicebot, or simply Alice, is a natural language processing chatterbot—a program that engages in a conversation with a human by applying some heuristical pattern matching rules to the human's input, and in its online form it also relies on a hidden third person. It was inspired by Joseph Weizenbaum's classical ELIZA program. It is one of the strongest programs of its type and has won the Loebner Prize, awarded to accomplished humanoid, talking robots, three times (in 2000,^[1] 2001,^[1] and 2004). However, the program is unable to pass the Turing test, as even the casual user will often expose its mechanistic aspects in short conversations.

Development

Alice was originally composed by Richard Wallace;^[2] it "came to life" on November 23, 1995.^[3] The program was rewritten in Java beginning in 1998. The current incarnation of the Java implementation is Program D. The program uses an XML Schema called AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) for specifying the heuristic conversation rules.^[4]

Alice code has been reported to be available as open source.^[5]

See also

• List of chatterbots

Notes

References

• Henderson, Harry (2007). Artificial intelligence: mirrors for the mind. New York: Infobase Publishing. ISBN 1604130598. OCLC 166421367. 
• Thompson, Clive (July 7, 2002). "Approximating Life". Magazine. The New York Times. Retrieved August 30, 2013.  Note: Online the article appears as four pages, which can be individually accessed by taking the article link and adding "?pagewanted=1" after it for the first page, or =2, =3 or =4 for each of the other pages available online.
• Wallace, Richard S. (2009). "The Anatomy of A.L.I.C.E.". In Epstein, Robert; Roberts, Gary; Beber, Grace. Parsing the Turing test. London: Springer Science+Business Media. pp. 181–210. ISBN 978-1-4020-6710-5. 

Further reading

• Chat between A.L.I.C.E and the chat bot Jabberwacky in Discover
• Fiske-Harrison, Alexander, A.L.I.C.E.'s springs - Do computers really converse?, The Times Literary Supplement, June 9, 2000.
• Sons and Daughters of HAL Go on Line by David Pescovitz, The New York Times, March 18, 1999.

External links

Wikinews has related news: Computer professionals celebrate 10th birthday of A.L.I.C.E.

• Richard Wallace's site
• Timeline of various versions
• Documentary film about Joseph Weizenbaum and ELIZA. ( "Weizenbaum. Rebel at Work." )
• Alicebot Creator Dr. Richard Wallace Expounds, Slashdot interview, 26 July 2002.
• Chat with A.L.I.C.E