Some more fun with Ruby and Instant messaging
January 22nd, 2008AI used to be one of my favorite subjects right from college days. I was searching for some AI algorithms and happened to find a ‘chat-bot’ called Eliza in between. ‘She’ was good enough, even though she doesn’t perfectly simulate a human user, she does a pretty good job. The next moment i wanted to use Eliza to talk to my friends on behalf of me through my Instant messenger.
Since i already had some ruby programs which could talk to IM servers, an interface to Eliza was just what i needed. I visted the Eliza’s webpage, one of the simplest webpages ever. It just had a plain html form, with a textfield and a submit button. The page source said that textfield’s name was “Entry1″. That was all i needed !
Here’s my Ruby interface for Eliza :
def eliza(str)
response = Net::HTTP.post_form(URI.parse("http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza-cgi-bin/eliza_script"),{'Entry1'=>str})
return response.body.split("</strong>\n").last.split("\n").first
end
Hats off to Ruby…!
Now whenever a chat message arrives on my IM program, i simply call this ‘eliza’ method, get a response string from Eliza, and send it as reply in the IM program.
Here’s the full Ruby code for the Eliza chat program.
Great work Unni..
Now got to reimplement this in Python
import httplib
import urllib
#Function that POSTS the string to eliza website and formats the reply
# my_dialog is the string that we POST to the www-ai.ijs.si website
# obtains the reply from eliza scripts and prints it on the screen
def eliza(my_dialog):
params = urllib.urlencode({’Entry1′: my_dialog})
headers = {”Content-type”: “application/x-www-form-urlencoded”,”Accept”: “text/plain”}
conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(”www-ai.ijs.si”)
conn.request(”POST”, “/eliza-cgi-bin/eliza_script”, params, headers)
response = conn.getresponse()
data = response.read()
print str(data.split(’‘)[2]).split(’\n’)[1]
conn.close()
# invoking the eliza function to test it’s functionality in pythonic way
if __name__== ‘__main__’:
eliza(’I love python’)