- Why is the project called Sofia?
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There is a tradition to call chatrobots
with names. The most prominent is "Alice".
Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850-1891) was a mathematician working on partial differential equations,
Abelian integrals among other things.
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- What software does Sofia use?
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We currently use a version of
Program D developed
by Noel Bush and contributors in Java.
This program seems currently no more in development. It was
the most stable open source solution we could find and runs
reasonablly well on Linux. We keep looking for updates since
there are stability issues problems when fed huge data junks.
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- On which hardware does sofia run
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Sofia lives in a PowerEdge 2650 Server (dual 3.06GHz Intel Xeon,
3Gig Memory, 4 hot-plug SCSI drives Raid X).
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- Why are the math entries primitive fortune format?
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Ever authored XML?
Plain text files without complex formatting are easy to edit,
search, proofread, spellchecked (even on a PDA.
They can be transferred into
other formats including AIML or fed into a database. Even
without a database or a chat-robot, you can use "fortune"
in a terminal: "fortune -m Fermat" produces for example all
known fortune entries which contain the word Fermat. Fortune
can be used as a primitive database, again, works even on a PDA like the
zaurus. It is reasonable fast since entries are stored in hash
tables. The simplicity makes it a convenient choice.
There is no danger that plain fortune files will ever be outdated.
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- Did anybody ever ask the questions on this page?
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