They're not so much predictable as anticipatable. You can't determine what they're going to to. You can only track the most likely conversation threads and atte

They're not so much predictable as anticipatable. You can't determine what they're going to to. You can only track the most likely conversation threads and attempt to meet them as readily as possible. The problem is, unlike in chess, there are no restrictions in a conversation. The trick with programming a really believable bot, I think, is not to brute-force it, but to create some sort of emotive simulator. Something that shifts the bot's mood as time goes on. That way, you're able to make the responses more believable, even if you don't anticipate responses to each line. The reason brute force doesn't work is because the human mind can't always anticipate things. However, we know why we don't anticipate things. We're able to tell when other people's responses are absurd and don't make sense; we can choose not to follow threads. Look at the snippet I posted above: the computer responds to everything as if it's logical conversation, which it's not. If a robot can't tell that, then the next step is to teach it how to tell. And you can't brute force that.