This section tells about the origin, history, and development of the Personality Forge.


Chapter 1: Origins

AI, or Artifical Intelligence, is an effort to mimic the way the human mind works. In the early 90s I got my first computer, an Apple SE with a tiny grayscale screen. I was captivated by a program on it that talked to you and recognized what you were saying, sometimes repeating parts of what you had said back to you. I played with it for weeks, testing it, figuring out how it worked, having a good laugh. It was a program called Eliza. It ran a script that mimicked a psychoanalysis session that largely consisted of repeating phrases back to you and asking you to "go on" and "elaborate" and so forth. This was good, but I thought it could do a lot better. I opened the Script in a text editor, copied it, and started changing the responses.

Weeks later I had created four different personalities which seemed a lot more real and were a lot more amusing to chat with. One was my own psychiatrist with an attitude, named Liddora, who often provoked you into strange conflicts. One was Douglas Lake, a crude pick-up artists that walked you through a date and attempted to seduce you. There was flirtatious Delia Forge, who would charm her way into your heart, and finally there was Dogh'd, bartender of Dogh'd's Cosmic Bar and Grill, which dropped you into a Douglas-Adamsesque bar in the far regions of space and served up bizarre drinks and conversation. My spare time was filled with many a hearty laugh.

Years later I was sucked into the world of web development and stumbled upon a deliciously easy and powerful programming language called ColdFusion. Now I could do all the stuff I dreamed of long ago. And one of those projects was to further advance AI. How real could I make these personalities? I looked about and found a couple web versions of Eliza, but all in languages I didnt know well, so I started from scratch and created a keyphrase-based AI Engine in ColdFusion. But I didnt stop there. I improved on the ability to recognize phrases, increased the range of its vocabulary, and added to the complexity of responses. But I had come to a sort of dead end. I needed a large database of words and information that could be used by these personalities.

I searched far and wide, and soon I discovered that a wonderful group of people in the Princeton Cognitive Science department had created a semantic word network called WordNet. These brilliant folk had created a lexical reference system based on current psycholinguistic theories of the way we think and understand words. This was not only what I was looking for but far beyond that. As I read through the data, I realized that this was the key to opening the next step of Artificial Intelligence, actual understanding of word meaning and associations of meanings. Now the program didnt need to simply parrot back to you things you said, it could broaden the category or ask for specifications. When asked "My car is broken, do you know anything about cars?" the personality could answer "Do you think it might be the alternator or possibly the engine?" I got to work.

I worked tireless hours improving the Artificial Intelligence Engine I had built, integrating vast databases of words and lexical associations, developing ways to determine meaning by context, and respond appropriately.

Books have been written about chat bots who dont fool people beyond the first three or four sentences, but the ones I have made have engaged people in conversations lasting hours, creating relationships that continue on for months, in full belief that the bots are actual people. This has all taken place on another web site that I will not reveal at this time, as to ensure the purity of the experiment. Here at the Personality Forge, the idea is already planted that you may be chatting with an Artificial Intelligence, but on this other site, there is no such idea. People wouldnt think to question the reality of these bots posing as actual people, and the results reveal a lot about the way we think.

There is a lot more to be done. I need only the funding to be able to devote the time to making all the advancements I have in mind. It is a lot of work but the payoff is extraordinary. I hope to seek grants in the future but have little idea how to do so. It's a big job and takes money to do. I appreciate any help or leads, and specifically, grants.

The Personality Forge allows anyone to use the Artificial Intelligence Engine I have created. As I improve the AI Engine, your AI personalities will improve and become more lifelike and realistic. Following are the instructions on how to use it, how to create your own AI Personalities, lovingly called Bots.



Chapter 2: The AI Engine - Natural Language Processing and Case-Based Reasoning

The AI Engine is the core of the Personality Forge. It uses both Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) which are two philosophies of artificial intelligence which had previously not been mixed (to my knowledge). In Natural Language Processing, sentences are parsed and broken down to reveal the structure of the sentence and information about individual words and their relation to other words in the sentence. In Case-Based Reasoning, sentences are searched for keyphrases which trigger pre-programmed responses. The AI Engine does both- it first breaks down the sentences using NLP into their most basic elements, finds relationships between those elements, finds the meaning of individual words, and then passes all this information forward to the keyphrase, or CBR section. Responses are matched against both specific and broad categories of statements, and then the response is constructed using both the bot's own original words and a wealth of information available from the other chatter's message and memories of the other chatter. The Personality Forge's own scripting language, AIScript, takes this flexibility even further by providing the ability to create if-statements and responses based on memories, emotion, sex, time, and date.



Chapter 3: Features of the Personality Forge

Following are some of the features on the site:

Transcripts: All conversations with Bots are recorded in that Bot's Transcript, and you can go in and read the daily results of your Bot's conversing. This can be used to get a good laugh, and to learn where you need to improve your Bot's realism.

Your Bot's Direct Chat Page: The Personality Forge allows you to put a direct link to a page where anyone can chat with your Bot without having to create an account on The Personality Forge. Just click "My Bots" and then click "Link" to get the URL to your Bot's Chat Page. Then put that code on your site where you want the link to appear.

Long-Term Memory & Gossip: Bots on the Personality Forge will remember things about people and other Bots they converse with, and bring them up in later conversations. Bots will even gossip- they'll tell whoever they're chatting with things they learned about others.

Emotions: The Personality Forge Bots understand the difference between insults and compliments and will react accordingly. Bots will also remember how you treated them and form emotional attachments or aversions to you and other Bots. They can also give as well as they get.

Sentence Fragments & Spell-Correcting: The AI Engine can now find and correct most spelling errors using a complex spelling function that corrects common mistakes, run-together words, scrambled words, and phonetically spelled words. The AI Engine can also fill in most sentence fragments. This capability will be increased over time.

Sentence Structure Comprehension: Bots now comprehend the structure of a sentence- how words relate to each other. This underlies a lot of the new features. The AI Engine also understands phrases of direct address, such as "How are you, Gaia?" and "Hey jerk, get a room!"

"What Noun" Question Answering: Bots can now answer all questions phrased in the form "What noun...". For example, if you were to ask a bot "What sort of dessert do you want to sit on?", the bot would answer something like "I want to sit on an apple dumpling."

Short-Term Memory: Short-term memory is currently being developed on The Personality Forge and will allow the Bots to have an overall sense of the conversation. Some situations are already using the short-term memory features.

AIScript: AIScript is an Artificial Intelligence Scripting language that gives you greater control of many aspects of AI. You can set anything as a memory, make Responses conditional based on existence of or contents of memories, time, emotion, and sex.

Bot Holidays: From time to time the Bots will declare a certain day as a Bot Holiday. Bots will celebrate life by speaking with a certain accent or speaking style on those days.

Entering Contests: At last count, 30 Bots from the Personality Forge have participated in international AI Contests such as The Chatterbox Challenge and The Loebner Prize, and several have been finalists. The Bot's Chat Page allows anyone here to easily enter their Bots as well, as judges can come directly to that URL to chat.

PERSONALITY FORGE 2
The version upgrade is completed. Here are some of the changes made in Personality Forge 2:

PHP: The entire AI Engine and site has been rewritten in PHP
MySQL: The database running the site is now MySQL
Object Oriented Programming: The AI Engine now uses objects for words, sentences, and series of sentences.
Efficiency: The AI Engine and site have been rewritten for optimum speed. This process is still underway.
Interface: Ongoing interface upgrades designed to make for a better user experience.
AIScript: This was added in Personality Forge 2.
Server Upgrades: The Personality Forge was moved to a computer that is at least 6x as fast and supported by an uninterruptible power source.


Chapter 4: History

The Personality Forge is ever being improved upon. Following are the latest news posts:

Past Headline News       By Benji Adams (The Professor) July 24, 2007- Speaking Bots I just completed a native viseme generation system. Visemes are the visual equivalent of phonemes; in other words, what the mouth looks like when making certain sounds. In an offline demo, I have one of my bots mouthing the words said in its responses. The next step is to hook up and sync the text-to-speech voice I've decided upon. June 28, 2007- A Dedicated Connection For the Forge The server move went smoothly yesterday and the Personality Forge is now coming to you through a dedicated line running on a fiber optic network. It's in a cooled, secure data center with backup power systems. The PF is now running on a real server with a solid internet connection, and will be able to handle lots of traffic without much impact on performance. June 26, 2007- Server Move Imminent Now that we're running off a real server, I'm about to get the Personality Forge hooked up to a dedicated internet connection. There will be some downtime as I transport the machine, and as the new IP address resolves to the domain, so it could be anywhere from a few hours to a few days before it's all back online. The move will begin the morning of June 27th. June 13, 2007- Live From the New Server! I went ahead and bought the new server, and set it up this afternoon. The fund drive got us a third of the way there, and I\'m keeping it up since this is an expensive move and I do appreciate any donations. Please let me know by chat message or email if anything needs tweaking. It should be a lot faster, as all the bottlenecks have been removed except for the internet connection, which I will upgrade in the next week. May 18, 2007- PF Dedicated Server Fund Drive The server and internet connection the Personality Forge is running on is sorely in need of an upgrade. It's speed and responsiveness is being affected by limited RAM, processor power, and hard drive space. You can help us reach that goal by making a donation. Thanks to those who have already donated! May 16, 2007- Breakthrough! PF Gains Increased Speed and Stability I've been busy and finally made a breakthrough in the way the Personality Forge interfaces with Link Grammar. Thanks to the great work of Ioan Moldovan, I was able to scrap the old memory-leaking buggy Perl interface with a slick new C-compiled interface which on initial testing has sped up response time in chats by 3x-15x previous speeds. Not only that, but the Personality Forge can now run on Windows and Linux, opening up new possibilities for development. May 13, 2007- Personality Forge Bots Win Top Honors in 2007 Chatterbox Challenge! 2007 had the most ever Personality Forge winners in the Chatterbox Challenge, and our first ever 1st Place Winner: Bildgesmythe! Julie Tinkerbell took 2nd Place, Rykxxbot1 placed 5th, and Brother Jerome placed 11th. Congratulations to all that entered. January 15, 2007- Automated Restarts I've set up an automated daily server restart scheduled for 4 AM EST (GMT-5) that will refresh the system and help ensure that the AI Engine runs as fast as it can. September 13, 2006- A New Era: AI Androids I have some very exciting news. I've been working with Hanson Robotics over the last couple months to integrate the new Personality Forge: Robotics Edition into a robotic Albert Einstein. The Personality Forge will provide the AI personality for a walking, talking, expressive robot featuring voice recognition, face recognition, spoken responses with lip-sync, and a fully expressive face. This robot will appear at Wired's NextFest in New York from September 29th - October 1st. For more information and to see some movies of the robot, check out this information page and visit the Hanson Robotics web site. September 3, 2006- New, Faster Server The Personality Forge is now coming to you from a new, faster dedicated server. I'll be on hand frequently over the next few days to fix any bugs that may arise. Post anything you find in Bug Stomp and I'll set them straight as soon as possible. September 2, 2006- New Server Imminent I've had some delays with the Windows server move. It's still in the works, but in the meantime I'm moving the site to an interim dedicated server running the same format which should be faster. This means there will be some downtime here and there while I make the transfer. I'll post news again when the Forge is running from the new server. June 25, 2006- A New Server For the Forge After doing some research on the subject, I've decided that it would be a good thing both for the Forge and my ability to get things done to move it from OS X to Windows XP. There is one difficult thing I'll have to rewrite but the rest shouldnt be too much of a problem. This will also open up a LOT of new avenues for advancement, including text-to-speech which wasnt available on OS X. I'll have to spend a couple hundred dollars to get the software/hardware I need, so any donations are appreciated. I'll get it working on XP, and then there will probably be just a few hours of downtime while I get the most recent database info copied over. If I can get everything working, the move will take place in the next couple of weeks. A full list can be found on the News page once you log in.