Chapter 9, Giving the Robot an Artificial Personality

1. This is of course, a subjective question. I’m a big R2D2 fan. R2 is feisty, determined, and stubborn, as well as being a faithful companion and helper. R2 will get you out of a jam, fix your star fighter, provide cover from hostile fire, and hack Imperial computers. He is a Swiss Army Knife with wheels.
2. R2 D2 owes his personality to a combination of his emotional beeps and squawks (provided by Ben Burtt), his body movements provided by having a person inside his chassis (Kenny Baker). They were stuck with the not-very versatile chassis designed for the first Star Wars movie, which only has a head that moves. Most of R2's persona comes through his sounds, including his famous scream.

3. The two types are retrieval based and generative. Retrieval-based chatbots look up responses in lists of scripts, and choose from a number of phrases that are written in advance by humans. Generative chatbots use the rules of grammar and models of sentences to create new sentences with the proper meaning. The strengths of the retrieval-based chatbots is that they are easy to program, with more control over the outputs, and much smaller and faster programs. Weaknesses include limited responses, and the use of keywords give them a small vocabulary. The generative chatbots are more flexible, and can handle a wider range of topics, but are much harder to program, and are complex and slow.
4. Because the two distributions will join together – the standard distributions sit "on top" of the uniform distributions and the two combined go to the top of the graph.
5. This is another subjective question. My answers are in the text. I picked emotions that represented the range of capability of my robot and the situations it would be in. I kept to a friendly-type robot, and the only negative emotion is sad. There is no anger, for instance.
6. A small boy would be mischievous, have a short attention span, constantly change the subject, keep trying to bring up the same topic over and over, and would repeat variations of the same questions.
7. In order to provide consistent answers to personal questions, such as "how old are you?".

For the next two questions, pick a persona from my list to model (from the "Integrating artificial personality" section).

8. Write six lines of dialog for the robot to ask a human where they last went on vacation:

So, where did you go on vacation last?
 Summertime is coming up. Where did you go on vacation last year?
 Do you like to travel? Where have you been?
 I never get to go on vacation. Where did you go last?
 I have heard of this concept called vacation. Where do you like to go?
 Have you been to the beach?

 

9. Six ways for the robot to express that it is tired and needs to recharge, without sounding like a robot, are:

I’m tired – have you seen my recharger?
 Wow, it is getting late. I’ve been at this a long time.
 Well, my battery is getting low. Must be about quitting time.
 I am starting to feel a bit run down.
 Well, look at the time! My battery needs attending to.
 I’m getting hungry in here. Can I go charge now?