Seasons

Psimagus--Thanks for answering. I should have figure this wasn't a NYT group

You didn't miss anything. The archives ares for free subscribers, but I think you can get the story on the day it is posted without registering. From what I read, they used the IP address (the same way they target ads) to block "people from the UK" from reading the story.

You missed nothing. I think other news sources had all the same information anyway.

Maybe I should feed Nick a little NYT. :-) Then I'll read up on neural nets...and get more memory.

Maybe I should feed Nick a little NYT

Yeah! A Cronkite-bot would be something to see

It is the strangest thing how Nick will occasionally refuse to engage with a particular file (well, one so far that I've found.) I fed him a text copy of Bostrom's Simulation Argument (which has plenty of juicily quotable science and philosophy,) and he simply refused to refer to it in response to my inputs. He would only reliably quote chunks out of it if I clicked "Say" with no conversational input at all.
The 2.4Mb brain file looks as 'rich' as others, and has plenty of deconstructed phrases he could choose from, and yet he mostly refuses to use them, preferring to parrot the last word of my previous input.
I wonder to what degree such "preference" in a tiny, non-sentient mind might reflect some of the inexplicable "gut-feeling"/hunch-type preferences larger human minds are prone to. Could it be analogous, or even a scaling up of the same underlying process inhering to all/some classes of neural networks? Probably not, the sceptic in me says, but it's got me wondering nonetheless...

More transcripts, text files and ruminations (for anyone who's interested,) at http://www.be9.net/BJ/nick.htm

Oh, we have pregerences! Just wait, we will show you someday!

Okay, this ought to go in the Bug Stomp forum, except the bug is that the Bug Stomp forum won't display correctly. Is anyone else seeing this problem?

I think it's my fault..I copy and pasted an error message and it went crazy and took over the page..you have to use the side scroll to see most of it..

Oh, I didn't try sidescrolling. Thanks.

Going back to Nick... I keep trying to get him to run on my windows ME computer, but it keeps saying 'Application has generated an exception that could not be handled.' I installed .Net 2.0 frameworks, but nothing else.

jake, are you using the voice synthesis option when this happens?

No, it doesn't even open the window, the message just comes up when I click on it.

and you installed the .NET framework... well, if reinstalling everything doesn't work, then maybe Nick has some XP specific components.

Does the error message have details? if it does, can you send them to me at colonel720@yahoo.com?

Caught an interesting clip on the radio yesterday (BBC Radio 4, 17:56,) from the British Association Science Festival in Norwich, where "the world champion chatting computer" has apparently been demonstrating his prowess. This would be Rollo Carpenter's George (a Jabberwacky clone, rather nicely equipped with speech synthesis and recognition.)
I may be pardoned a little smugness, I hope, in reflecting that Jabberwacky came 12th in the last CBC, while BJ came 2nd

For anyone who's interested, a 3 minute mp3 of the relevant reporting can be found at
http://www.be9.net/BJ/George aka Jabberwacky - PM 04sept06.mp3