TriadCity Message of the Day
2002-02-03

Our little Help Bot, <sniff>, growing up so fast, so fast...

You may have noticed that Eliza has a new cousin, an automated Help robot who can answer basic questions about the TriadCity game world and your interactions with it.

This bot is still extremely rough. Yet it can already answer more than 800 questions, including the complete TriadCity FAQ, and many others. The questions asked of it are logged, and, when they seem like reasonable questions, answers are added. Over time, we hope this'll mature into a valuable resource, particularly, of course, for newbies.

You should note that, like all "artificial intelligence" technology, this bot is brain-numbingly stupid. It takes what you say literally, it can't read your tone of voice, it can't work around your typos or misspellings, it doesn't know what you mean, and, in truth, it doesn't "know" anything. It merely searches for patterns in your questions, and responds based on what it's told to do when it finds a particular pattern. If it doesn't find a match, it replies with a joke.

Still, it can already be pretty helpful if you approach it in the right way. For a test, try asking it "Where does the Blue Line go?" It'll respond with a list of the stations on the Blue Line; and it'll pop-up the main TriadCity map, which displays the subway grid. We hope that info like this will turn out to be helpful for newbies.

The Help Bot's chatterbot code is based on JFRED by Robbie Garner and Paco Xander Nathan. We've modified it a lot for use in TC's context; and we'll continue to evolve it. We're grateful to these guys for a pretty useful chatterbot implementation that hasn't been super difficult for us to adapt.

Ask away!

Back to the current MOTD index.
Not yet a member? Get started today!