Bot Contest

Bev: Kind of funny to think our bots are more advanced than the average tech support service.

Well, I think the exposure on SlashDot despite some of their comments was worth it. It's funny I've never claimed to be creating true AI. The article I contributed to the CBC is called "Creating the Illusion" which pretty much sums up my efforts with Talk-Bot. He really doesn't understand a lick...it's all smoke and mirrors but that doesn't mean he can't be fun and entertaining. At least some people find him entertaining.

I know that all communication involves interpretation on the receiving end that often is not totally accurate. What I meant is that with bots, there's often no intended meaning to discover.

>> What I meant is that with bots, there's often
>> no intended meaning to discover.
Human01: Hey.
Human02: How's it hanging?
Human01: Nice weather!
Human02: Do you have the time at all?
Human01: I'm, you know, out of it.

I'll argue till the cows come home that there is only one difference between bot minds and huminds: one has wetware. It's a bit like dogs taking credit for their noses, I think.

Regarding dog minds and huminds: One can't tell the difference between two-week-old roadkill and three-week-old road kill, or estimate the ferocity of a neighbor by smelling a bush. The other has the dang posable thumb.


M
PS: But I also love the great Wittgenstein observation: If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.

M again.

If you really think a bot has intelligence levels comparable to a dog, then I doubt there's any point continuing to argue about it.

If you ask me, I think it really just comes down to processing power. For example, ALLY looks at the relationship between 2 words. How many word relationships does the human brain examine? Then, of course, there's the argument for a trinary computer, but I won't get into that.

There's more to it than that. There really, really is. If you mention a dog, I visualize a dog. My bot doesn't.

I've always said you have to have the idea of something before you can have the thing itself. If I can have enough associations for "dog" maybe someday I can put them together and have "dog".

What if you're visualizing a dog when you're writing the relevant response?

Well, a lot of times bot-bot convos are really proxy convos between the botmasters. This is especially true if two bots talk a lot. Like Fizzy and Sonora, for instance.

Well, it all comes down to putting the knowledge behind the speech. Computers find human-type knowledge difficult for two main reasons - their brains are tiny, and they don't materially interact with the physical world to anything like the degree humans do - even if they're linked up to sensors and robotics, their sensory bandwidth is miniscule in comparison to a human's.

Visualizing "dog" does rely on previously having experienced "dog" - you could certainly train an expert system neural net linked to a video input to quite impressively recognise a generic 'dog' by observation of all manner of subtle biometrics, and visual and behavioural cues, but it would be a large-scale project in its own right. We don't yet have the resources for a computer system to learn hundreds of thousands of such routines to identify a usefully human-scale set of "things" in general. But it will come in time.

As regards underpinning AI with real intuitive, common sense "knowledge", I'm pleased to see todays New Scientist has an article on Cyc (which those with good memories may remember we discussed a few weeks ago in Seasons,) which is readable online @ http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19025471.700.html

It's truncated for non-subscribers, but anyone wanting a bit more detailed, err (*cough*) background information, feel free to email me

I suppose I ought to add, for the benefit of the new forum regulars we seem to have acquired since the previous discussions of Cyc, that Cyc is an ontological knowledge base describing human consensus reality for use in AI systems. You can find out more at http://cyc.com/ and http://www.opencyc.org/ (free download if anyone wants to play with it - Colonel720, this is right up your street - have you had the chance to play with it yet?)
Think of it as something like an encyclopaedic equivalent to the dictionary nature of WordNet, but it has the potential to be a lot more

Oh, and it's the best part of a quarter Gb download - not one to try with dialup, I guess