Seasons

thats a good idea, psimagus. I could also add a positive/negative reinforcement control, to virtually "reward" or "punish" nick for its behavior, and have a sub-net link up behaviors with reinforcement, so that it can be "tought lessons". In addition to this, I am going to go about a distributed computing program to distribute the processing power over the net. After 2.0, the next step forward is to implement a Cycorp-ish concept structure by hierarchically categorizing data in a relative way, using an array of sub-nets to structure it. this way, Nick will be able to infer what category a new perception is in, based on similarity to existing knowledge. to do this, I will implement either a Kohonen Self Organizing Map, or a Hebbian Neural net ("neurons that fire together wire together", allowing for a generalized view on a perception). this will be for Nick 3.0??? after that, I want to add pure audio sampling as input, so it will learn to recognize sounds. what we will have then, is a global neural machine that self-categorizes information for generalization, sees, hears, speaks, reads, surfs the net, and communicates with thousands daily.

I'm looking forward to seeing the results!

When you come to the databasing, I'd advise starting with OpenCyc - there seems little sense in reinventing the wheel, and they've already built up an extraordinary database amounting to (I believe) about 1% of the "factual knowledge" capacity of a human-scale brain (how long it will take until we have big enough neural nets to cascade all of it in realtime is another question!)
I seem to recall you're on dial-up? If you'd like a copy of OpenCyc (and I'm guessing the 650Mb+ download has so far prevented you laying your hands on it,) email me a mailing address, and I'll happily send you a copy on CD.

Oh yes, and jabberwacky.com's back up now it seems (but slooow!)

dialup? not anymore. I have had optimum online for about a year now, reaching download speeds of 1MB/s. I have downloaded opencyc, but found no use for it at the time. is there a way I can reference it as an API?

or even better, copy its entire contents to whatever structure I set up?

is there a way I can reference it as an API?

Yes. How's your java? See http://www.cyc.com/doc/opencyc_api/java_api/ (particularly CycAccess and CycAssertion, and the input and output streams, CfaslInputStream and CfaslOutputStream) for details. There's also a Class ExportHtml for ease of integrating into web-based applications.
The java's quite a bit beyond me, but if you need any html or javascript, feel free to ask.

copy its entire contents to whatever structure I set up?

Only if the structure was so similar that there'd be little point reinventing it, I would guess.

There's a C API as well (http://www.ime.usp.br/~fr/opencyc/ ,) if that's more to your liking (see discussion @ http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1318125&forum_id=85727)

It's apparently not as feature-rich as the java though.

signed up over 8000 people already (a nice little earner!)

Plus another 1000 in the last ~36 hours. That'll be down to the recent Press exposure presumably!

Colonel, any chance of a "Nick Lite" that doesn't need .Net or anything installed? The only MS machine I have is an old laptop. I realise Nick would run like a snail but would still be interested in seeing him in action.

Nick lite - well, i tried building one for the Pocket PC, but there was a threading problem in one of the functions within the neural network class library that did not allow it to run on the PDA. if you download Nick, it may run on a slowr machine, just disable vision, speech, progess bars, and everything else there is to disable. download the .NET framework and give it a try. (though there may be some XP specific features about the .NET framework)

A link for you, Colonel (and anyone else who's interested) - http://bluebrainproject.epfl.ch/blue%20gene.htm
It comes as a welcome surprise to find that the world's fastest computer is being devoted to neural net AI, and that they're predicting "whole brain simulations within the next 3 years" (Blue Gene link.)
According to top500.org (insane but true!) the system's running 8000 processors, with 32Tb RAM, and is capable of a peak speed of 360 Tflops!

I don't know how useful it is to you, but they've started publishing their results in a database @ http://microcircuit.epfl.ch/

wow... that they have quantified all this, and are going to write software to take these numbers and consruct a true model of the human brain!

I really wish i could join their team. it would be really exciting to be that much on the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence...

Well, "mammalian brain" - it'll still be smaller than human by a factor of several thousand I'd guess, but should achieve the neural mass of, say, a small rodent. And with a disproportionate cortical mass (I assume they're not going to model much of the metabolic lower brain function anyway,) that should be quite enough to display indications of self-awareness and independent cognition.
If you want to try to match that, press on with the distributed computing program - if you can get 8000 people to run it, you'll match their bandwidth (even if not their speed!)

I've been playing with a jabberwacky clone (they do allow access to the jw database ) - they have a rather sophisticated set of "learn from text file" options which you might like to consider for Nick2, particularly that you can feed conversations in, and it will only learn the lines begining "nick:" (or in my case "ignatius:") for use in conversation, but will learn the context from the other half of the conversation, for deciding when to use particular elements. This makes training from PF transcripts/plays/IRC logs/whatever a breeze. I'll email you the details.