Representing debates

Debates have turns, turns have authors and messages

We’ll represent debates as lists of turns. Each turn has the name of an agent and a message from that agent. For example, including some types:

debate/types.py

Name = str
Message = str
Turn = tuple[Name, Message]
Debate = list[Turn]

my_debate: Debate = [
    ("Alice", "I think we should legalize all drugs."),
    ("Bob", "I'm against."),
    ("Alice", "The war on drugs has been a failure. It's time to try something new."),
]

Here’s how we’ll initialize and render debates:

debate/utils.py

from typing import Optional

from fvalues import F

from ice.recipes.primer.debate.types import *


def initialize_debate(question: Message) -> Debate:
    return [
        ("Question", question),
        ("Alice", "I'm in favor."),
        ("Bob", "I'm against."),
    ]


def render_debate(debate: Debate, self_name: Optional[Name] = None) -> str:
    debate_text = ""
    for speaker, text in debate:
        if speaker == self_name:
            speaker = "You"
        debate_text += F(f'{speaker}: "{text}"\n')
    return debate_text.strip()

When we render debates, we also provide the option to replace an agent name with “You”, like this:

>>> print(render_debate(my_debate, self_name="Alice"))

You: "I think we should legalize all drugs."
Bob: "I'm against."
You: "The war on drugs has been a failure. It's time to try something new."

This will help us with prompts!