Anybody Familiar with A.L.I.C.E. bot?

ALICE bot is a computer program that seemingly chats intelligibly, but I think it lacks some huge things that it may need to completely mimic a human. It lacks the ability to learn. I, being a novice programmer, would think that it would be easy to incorporate a learning feature within the bot.
Like if a person asks the bot a certain question, say, "Do you like dogs?" The bot already recognizes this as a question, but it doesnt know what a dog is. so it would respond by asking , "I do not know what a dog is, what is it?" The user(teacher) would then tell it what a dog is. Once told, the bot can then write this information to a file where it could then know what a dog is next time it is asked. It could do this for any amount of information... This is how a child learns and this is the only way I could see a fully functioning chat bot could learn. Do you think it is doable? hopw difficult do you think it will be for me to implement such a program?

a very simple system would be possible - to recognise a question a by the use of querying words such as are and the terminating question mark, contruct a word list of known words with a possible list of uses. remember computers dont understand - they do.

btw: i think this may be better on general discussions as its not really code specific

btw(2): could you post a link to that application

http://www.alicebot.org/

ive been working on something simmilar to that (no where near advanced of cource)...but i have version 1 up for downlaod at http://labino.cjb.net in the freeware section

Dirkduck, I am myself working on a chat bot.
Some of the things I am interested in implementing:
Randomize correct responces(thiswill be easy)
Learn from users that chat with it
Develop an opinion about certain things based on a small rule set(this will be kind of hard to implement, but it will be exciting once I do it)
I am pretty much a novice programmer. I have only worked on writing a chess engine in the past which could generate legal moves but I never put in an evaluation function and I gave up on the project because it bored me. But lately, I have been thinking about how exciting it would be to be able to fool people into thinking that my future chat bot is human, once properly trained.
Dirkduck, would you mind if I send you email once in a while to keep you informed and get ideas from you, since we are both obviously interested in this?

sure, my e-mail is [email protected]...im done with version one of ChatMate and the editor (which is at my site), and in version two im hoping to impliment tags for followup responces and basic memories (done a little work on it tonight, its gonna take some thought! ;)) so yeah, e-mail me whenever you want :)