I think I found a duplicate pattern in ‘reduction4safe.aiml’
On lines 7200 and 7709 are 2 identical patterns (except that 1 has an extra space in the pattern):

That’s typical. The ALICE AIML set id full of typographical errors, duplicate categories, self-referencing entries, and all sorts of other mistakes that can sometimes confuse even the most experienced veteran. The extra space may or may not make a difference, depending on the interpreter. With Program O, the extra space is removed during normalization of the pattern.

I also remove spaces. My system is pretty strict in duplicates, they are allowed, but only if you flag them so (sometimes required, if you have 2 patterns in differnt topics for instance), otherwise it continuously shows up as an error.

What both Pandorabots and Program O do is to allow multiple categories with duplicate patterns, and randomly selects which one to use at the time the input is matched. This gives a certain amount of variety, if the templates are different, but it’s a bit of a resource waste if the templates are identical, too.

That’s possibly something I could do. And put the ‘duplicate test’ as a warning.

Pandorabots will ignore the duplicate space. If you have two categories the same in Pandorabots, only the latest one loaded will be used. The other one is ignored. This is why most update files are found towards the end of the AIML files in a Pandorabot.

Interesting.