A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), also referred to as Alicebot, or simply Alice, is a

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

chatterbot A chatbot or chatterbot is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. Designed to convincingly simulate the way a human would behav ...

—a program that engages in a conversation with a human by applying some heuristical pattern matching rules to the human's input. It was inspired by

Joseph Weizenbaum Joseph Weizenbaum (8 January 1923 – 5 March 2008) was a German American computer scientist and a professor at MIT. The Weizenbaum Award is named after him. He is considered one of the fathers of modern artificial intelligence. Life and caree ...

's classical

ELIZA ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between humans and machines, ...

program. It is one of the strongest programs of its type and has won the

Loebner Prize The Loebner Prize was an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awards prizes to the computer programs considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The prize is reported as defunct since 2020. The format of the competition was tha ...

, awarded to accomplished humanoid, talking robots, three times (in 2000,Thompson 2002, pg. 3 2001, and 2004). The program is unable to pass the

Turing test The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to artificial intelligence, exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing propos ...

, as even the casual user will often expose its mechanistic aspects in short conversations. Alice was originally composed by Richard Wallace; it "came to life" on November 23, 1995. The program was rewritten in

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

beginning in 1998. The current incarnation of the Java implementation is Program D. The program uses an

XML Schema An XML schema is a description of a type of Extensible Markup Language, XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed ...

called AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) for specifying the heuristic conversation rules. Alice code has been reported to be available as

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

. The AIML source is available fro
ALICE A.I. Foundation on Google Code
and from th
GitHub account of Richard Wallace
These AIML files can be run using an AIML interpreter like Program O o
Program AB

In popular culture

Spike Jonze Adam H. Spiegel (born October 22, 1969), known professionally as Spike Jonze, is an American filmmaker, actor, musician, and photographer. His work includes commercials, film, music videos, skateboard videos and television. Jonze began his ca ...

has cited ALICE as the inspiration for his academy award-winning film

Her Her is the objective and possessive form of the English-language feminine pronoun She (pronoun), she. Her, HER or H.E.R. may also refer to: Arts, entertainment and media Music * H.E.R. (born 1997), American singer **H.E.R. (album), ''H.E.R.'' ...

, in which a human falls in love with a chatbot. In a New Yorker article titled “''Can Humans Fall in Love with Bots?''” Jonze said “that the idea originated from a program he tried about a decade ago called the ALICE bot, which engages in friendly conversation.” The LATimes reported:

Though the film’s premise evokes comparisons to Siri, Jonze said he actually had the idea well before the Apple digital assistant came along, after using a program called Alicebot about ten years ago. As geek nostalgists will recall, that intriguing if at times crude software (it flunked the industry-standard Turing Test) would attempt to engage users in everyday chatter based on a database of prior conversations. Jonze liked it, and decided to apply a film genre to it. “I thought about that idea, and what if you had a real relationship with it?” Jonze told reporters. “And I used that as a way to write a relationship movie and a love story.”

Notes

References

* * ''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.'' *

External links

* * * {{cite web , url= https://news.slashdot.org/story/02/07/26/0332225/alicebot-creator-dr-richard-wallace-expounds , title= Alicebot Creator Dr. Richard Wallace Expounds , publisher= Slashdot , work= Interview , date= July 26, 2002 , author= Roblimo, accessdate=2022-06-11 Chatbots

In popular culture

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

External links