AI Example Help

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 4:44 PM, Trevor Nelson <blindphaze at gmail.com> wrote:
> I really would truely appreciate and example coding of how to put together an initial basic "AI" bot where it can monitor the system and tell me alerts as with being able to query it for questions. As with I am looking for some sort of time efficient way for it to gather it's own data. As otherwise all the information I would have to manually put in would be extreme.

An interesting concept. AI monitoring systems have never really
appealed to me; I personally prefer something with simpler and clearer
rules (eg "if server load exceeds 3.0, raise an alert"), coupled with
information retrieval commands that read like commands, not natural
English. But I can see the value of the more "human-friendly style",
if that's the term for it.

> I greatly appreciate any help you guys can prodive me with to help me get started. Before you assume I want everyone to do all the work for me, it's not the case. It's just that I learn best/faster from example code.
> Also, I am thinking of going with python 2.7 for this since it seems all the documentation I run into isn't for the 3.x Python.
>

Understandable.

I would recommend treating this as two completely separate projects:
1) Natural language request/response - the "AI" bit, tinkering with
the HOWIE bot
2) Server status querying, log analysis, etc, etc.

You may already be familiar with one or the other, I don't know. But
in any case, they're quite separate; it'll be easier to develop one
and then the other. Divide your problem into pieces, then divide the
pieces further, and keep on dividing until you have a series of
one-banana problems[1].

I would also recommend using Python 3.3, for several reasons:
* There's plenty of docs for 3.3; perhaps web searches are
highlighting 2.x, but if you go to the main docs page[2] you'll find
3.3 there.
* Py3 has much better Unicode support than Py2, a significant factor
when you're working with natural language parsing
* The 2.x line is no longer being developed. Only bugfixes and
security patches will be applied. 3.x, on the other hand, has cool
toys added periodically with new versions.

ChrisA

[1] http://catb.org/jargon/html/O/one-banana-problem.html
[2] http://docs.python.org/py3k/