Eliza 9 - The first complex pattern

by Ravi Bhavnani

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Now that we have everything in place to create complex patterns, let's start by creating the REMEMBER pattern we looked at in the previous step. We'll place RememberPattern in a folder that will hold all complex patterns, just as we did earlier for format-free patterns. This is simply an aspect of code organization (keeping related classes in a folder), and has no impact on how Eliza runs.

Creating RememberPattern

This is how the REMEMBER pattern is defined in Eliza's script.

    key: remember 5

      decomp: * i remember *
        reasmb: Do you often think of (2)?
        reasmb: Does thinking of (2) bring anything else to mind?
        reasmb: What else do you recollect?
        reasmb: Why do you recollect (2) just now?
        reasmb: What in the present situation reminds you of (2)?
        reasmb: What is the connection between me and (2)?

      decomp: * do you remember *
        reasmb: Did you think I would forget (2)?
        reasmb: Why do you think I should recall (2) now?
        reasmb: What about (2)?
        reasmb: goto what // <-- Ignore this for now
        reasmb: You mentioned (2)?

Our RememberPattern constructor will closely resemble this and will call on ComplexPattern.Initialize() to initialize the class, much like format-free pattern constructors called FormatFreePattern.Initialize().

TRY TO WRITE THE CONSTRUCTOR FOR RememberPattern. WHEN YOU'RE DONE, COMPARE YOUR CODE TO THE SCREENSHOT BELOW.

Now that we've created RememberPattern, let's add it to Eliza's list of patterns. This is done in Eliza.Initialize().

Eliza will use RememberPattern to generate a response if the user's input contains the words REMEMBER or RECALL. Let's test this by running Eliza and telling her:

  I REMEMBER PLAYING IN A BAND WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER.

WHAT HAPPENED? HOW WILL YOU FIX THIS?

Fixing the problem

If you've been writing code along with this step, you would have found that Eliza encountered a run-time error in the method FindMatchingPatternForInput(). This is because Eliza assumes that the matching pattern (if found) will always be of type FormatFreePattern. But Eliza's world now also includes classes derived from ComplexPattern.

See the section "Allowing Eliza to consume ComplexPatterns" in the previous step for a hint as to how to fix the problem.

WHEN YOU'VE FIXED Eliza.FindMatchingPatternForInput(), COMPARE YOUR CODE TO THIS STEP'S SOLUTION.

Testing RememberPattern

Now that we've fixed the crash, we're ready to test RememberPattern. Run Eliza and give it the same input as before.

Although this isn't how (most) humans respond, Eliza is doing exactly what we told it do. Once we replace the stubbed methods in DecompReassemblyRule with real code, RememberPattern will respond as described in Eliza's script .

We'll see how to do that in the next step!