Game on for Fabric Composer

Earlier in the week I was pondering some blockchain gamification with @howard_is, inspired by a recent GameOn challenge for early professionals in IBM. After helping out with a run through of the IBM InterConnect Fabric Composer lab this morning, it seemed like a good opportunity to make a start.

Instead of running yet another car auction, I think it could be fun to have a demo based on a ‘business’ network for playing games. To keep some similar elements to the more common trading examples, I’m currently wondering if keeping tabs on multi-player adventure games would work. This is the model I’ve come up with so far, and it seems like something that could be hooked up to a simple text based (powered by Watson Conversation of course!) or graphical game interface.

	/**
	* Defines a data model for a multi-player game
	*/
	namespace org.example.game
	enum ItemType {
	o POTION
	o WEAPON
	}
	asset Item identified by itemId {
	o String itemId
	o String name
	o ItemType type
	–> Player owner optional
	}
	asset Trophy identified by trophyId {
	o String trophyId
	o String name
	–> Player owner optional
	}
	asset Game identified by gameId {
	o String gameId
	o Player[] players
	–> Trophy prize
	}
	participant Player identified by characterName {
	o String characterName
	}

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org.example.game.cto

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If you’re interested in playing with your own blockchain network, fire up the Fabric Composer Playground and have a go. If you want to know more @danielselman will be at InterConnect next week, or get in touch with the community. Better yet, join in!

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Watson Conversation System Entities

The Watson Conversation service now includes built-in support for a few new entities. These system entities make it much simpler to identify numbers, currency values or percentages in a conversation.

The only slight gotcha is that system entities are not enabled by default. I would definitely recommend enabling all the system entities when you create a new workspace- there’s no downside and you’ll start seeing what system entities will be matched in the try out panel. (It’s also worth checking for new system entities when you make any changes to an existing workspace!)

I’ve recorded a quick demo on YouTube if you want to see system entities in action, and there’s a demo workspace in the conversation-starter project on GitHub.

A little more conversation

More than a year seems to have vanished somewhere since I left MDM for new adventures with Watson. It’s even been a few months since the new Conversation service first appeared on Bluemix, along with the tools I’ve been helping to build.

If you’re interested in Watson Conversation, or just curious about what I’ve been up to for the last year, these are a few blog posts which I’ve come across which explain everything better than I could:

• A trilogy An awesome saga on how to build bots from Simon Burns (if you don’t read any others, read these!)
  • Seriously, what do I need a bot for?
  • The Bots Are Coming!
  • Getting Chatty with IBM Watson
  • Conversation Patterns with Watson
  • An Adventure with Watson
  • Bot Feedback with IBM Watson
• Another great trilogy More great posts, this time from Simon O’Doherty
  • New system entities feature
  • The road to good intentions
  • Using counters in conversation
  • Handling Low Confidence Answers in Conversation
  • Understanding How a Conversation Flows
  • What is Your Name?
• Build a chat bot in ten minutes with Watson
• Getting started with Watson Conversation in 6 simple steps
• Watson Conversation over SMS
• How To Build a Recipe Slack Bot Using Watson Conversation and Spoonacular API
• Watson Conversation with Alchemy Entity Extraction
• Create your Slack bot with Conversation API & Node-RED
• Automating creation of ChatBot dialog using the new IBM Watson Conversation service

This thing seems pretty popular, so there are videos too!

 

There are even a few GitHub repositories:

• bathrugby_bot
• botmaster
• conversation-simple
• conversation-starter
• text-bot
• tjbot
• WatBot

And of course, tweets

Watson Conversation – Curated tweets by jtonline

If that’s not enough, you can ask questions on Stack Overflow and dw Answers, or join the Watson Developer Community.

If you’re building something with Watson Conversation, I’d love to hear about it! And finally, if you have any tips or tricks that you could share, I’m trying to collect some for a conversation-starter project on GitHub.

Updated: lots more links!

 

And now for something completely different

After almost 10 years in Master Data Management, most of which with the rather lovely view below, I’ve moved on to Watson.

I can’t quite believe I stayed in the same department that long but there were plenty of fresh challenges along the way, and no shortage of people inside and outside IBM to keep it interesting.

I’ve been particularly lucky to have had so much support building up the MDM Developers community, which should be in safe hands to continue growing in the future. (If you’re interested in MDM and haven’t attended one of the live tech talk sessions, I would definitely recommend trying one. There are recordings of all the previous events on YouTube and check out Dany’s OSGi talk for a great example.)

If my first day in Watson is anything to go by, the next challenge is going to be far from dull!