ECTOR is an acronym standing for the French Entité Cybernétique Totalement Obligée de Réfléchir (Cybernetic entity totally compelled to think). It is also a name similar to Hector, the Troyan hero, Achille's enemy. Actually, Achille killed Hector, but I hope here, they will make peace (Achille is a kind of ECTOR's ancestor, see this little story) ;-)
I want ECTOR to be an intelligent chatterbot (more intelligent than Achille, but it is likely that it will not be as impressive as Achille --in the beginning--, it has to learn many things before).
ECTOR is based on a artificial intelligence architecture, I called BAsCET (it is shown, in French, in my PhD Thesis, or on Everything2, in English), that is inspired from Copycat, an AI system from Mitchell and Hofstadter.
It is a mix between neural and semantic networks, uses agents and a blackboard. Its Concept Network uses co-occurences to compute influences of one semantic node on another.
Next, I'll present some technical notes which are used to implement a prototype. See the SourceForge project, to see the code, put some remarks, or report a bug.
There is an old prototype online of the PHP version! Please be kind enough to consider it as a deprecated version. To interact with it, type a sentence and your name (if you want a better relationship with ECTOR, you should enter your name, else it won't "recognize" you the next time). It answers to your entries, but, as it is not specialized for any particular language, it is likely to mix several languages. You can see how complex its thoughts are, by looking at its Concept Network (click on "nodes"). Unfortunately, even with an optimization, the current web server is overloaded, and so, phpECTOR can't reply any more.
That's why I rewrote it in C. I called this C version cECTOR (it works under UNIX and is usable under Windows thanks to Cygwin). The C version is quicker and can be called from other scripts. I already bound it to an EggDrop on IRC. Of course, you can call it from a shell (under CygWin or under UNIX).
If you want to look at ECTOR's bookmarks, go here.
François Parmentier