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cherokeepatti Like a human learning appropriate behavior by studying the actions of members of his or her social group, Cleverbot "learns" from these conversations. It stores them all in a huge database, and in every future conversation, its responses to questions and comments mimic past human responses to those same questions and comments.
If, for example, you were to ask Cleverbot, "How are you?" it will look back to the many times it has asked or been asked that question to retrieve a fitting response. And, because it's pulling up an answer that a human has typed, the response will sound mostly human (at least in theory).
The key to Cleverbot's success is that it doesn't respond solely on the basis of the last thing typed, but keeps track of words and phrases that have come up in the conversation already. As Carpenter explained, "It looks back to the whole conversation and says, there are maybe tens of thousands of people who have maybe responded to 'how are you?' in the past; which of those tens of thousands of responses is most suitable to use this time?" [How Do Calculators Calculate?]
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/44434584/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/how-cleverbot-computer-chats-human/#.WmtPb6inFPY
