From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Sun Dec 29 2002 - 18:39:02 MST
On 12/29/02 4:22 PM, "Gary Miller" <garymiller@starband.net> wrote:
>
> Each
> web client would need to run a separate instance of the application also due
> to the bot's need to maintain context within each conversation.
I don't know anything about your application, but couldn't a properly
threaded app handle this with a single process image plus a little context
memory. It certainly sounds like it to me.
> I have some college students giving
> me a bid on a Web interface and trying to get me and inexpensive host site,
> but the last estimate I received from a national ISP was about $750 a month.
[ OFFTOPIC ]
$750/month for what? That much money will get you a few Mbps (not even
oversubscribed) on a GigE fiber backbone and rackspace around here (and many
other parts of the country). And these are at standard commercial rates for
a dedicated circuit straight to the core, not preferential rates or with
looser SLAs. It sounds like you are getting ripped on prices.
What are you looking for precisely? Go ahead and respond offline, but I
might be able to help you out. I am an original principal at one of the
fastest growing top-tier network providers in the world currently (and
attracting a good amount of buzz both for our network performance and the
fact that they are making money and growing while everyone else goes
bankrupt). This is one of my investments that I am actively involved in on
a weekly basis among other things, so I can personally see what they could
do for you. They continue to be exceptionally price competitive for what
they offer.
[ /OFFTOPIC ]
> Note the mam(m){a|e}l in the pattern allows mammal to be spelled mamel, mamal,
> mammal, or mammel to allow for common misspellings.
> An additional Levenschtein distance calculation is also used if a less common
> misspelling is encountered and the pattern does not match pattern 1.
This seems like a very brittle way of doing things. A smart system should
be able to automatically read through misspellings based on the context of
the entire sentence. It makes for vastly smaller memory and computational
requirements than trying to exhaustively search some arbitrary parameter
space. Statistical methods would be better here, but you'd need a pretty
clever data structure to make such searches efficient.
> But
> some such as the pattern for greetings can run 2400 characters in length to
> accomadate all of the various ways of greeting a person.
I'm guessing that if you efficiently compressed all those greetings you are
testing for, it would take less than 2400 characters (or 4800 bytes, since
you are probably storing Unicode using .NET), probably by a fair margin.
Not that this is particularly important to you, but there is a theoretical
notion buried in there. I realize that what you are doing is mostly chatbot
type stuff, but it seems incredibly exhausting, both in time and resources
to try and scale this.
Cheers,
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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