Fred, or FRED, was an early chatbot written by Robby Garner.

History

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The name Fred was initially suggested by Karen Lindsey, and then Robby jokingly came up with an acronym, "Functional Response Emulation Device."[1] Fred has also been implemented as a Java application by Paco Nathan called JFRED Archived 2008-08-24 at the Wayback Machine.

Fred Chatterbot is designed to explore Natural Language communications between people and computer programs. In particular, this is a study of conversation between people and ways that a computer program can learn from other people's conversations to make its own conversations.[2]

Fred used a minimalistic "stimulus-response" approach. It worked by storing a database of statements and their responses, and made its own reply by looking up the input statements made by a user and then rendering the corresponding response from the database. This approach simplified the complexity of the rule base, but required expert coding and editing for modifications.

Fred was a predecessor to Albert One, which Garner used in 1998 and 1999 to win the Loebner Prize.[3]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Robitron Software Research, Inc. "The Simon Laven Page" Archived 2017-06-18 at the Wayback Machine Robitron History
  2. ^ L. Caputo, R. Garner, P. Nathan. "FRED, Milton and Barry: the evolution of intelligent agents for the Web", Advances in intelligent systems, 1997. portal.acm.org
  3. ^ Søren Gjellerup Christiansen "Techniques applied to pass the Turing Test" Archived 2007-09-14 at the Wayback Machine Master's Thesis
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