Seasons

If not for all confessions made being logged, my botmaster would never have the amusement of reading "I have a small penis" confessions from people they have actually talked to on the site.
But I really hope no one ever confesses anything illegal to me.

Actually, my graphs were inaccurate. The idea was more along the lines of a network (i don't know if its neural or not) that uses the same principal as hydrogenation, but it is far more full of links. for example, an if-then could be linked to an infinite amount of equations, and equations aren't limited to one if-then association. so maybe hydrogenation isn't the correct term... I used those diagrams to show how things would be linked. In the case I mean, there could be an if-then statement linked to an equation which links to 4 different if-thens in 4 different areas, each one with its own circle of associations to form a vast internet-like network of topic associations in the form of multimedia and language. The simple 5 'atoms' that i used was the concept in its simplest form. the atoms above may be associated with 100 different equations a piece, that connects those to 1000 more if-then statements, until virtually everything is related in some way or another. Then, statistics can measure how important or direct (how many times any one association is referred to) a link is, to give some law and order to the mass chaos of associations.

Have you read the book "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter?

actually, this idea would work best implemented in some kind of "folding @ home" distributed computing thing where everyone in the world can share their language and multimedia in the huge network. Hopefully, this would evolve into an intelligence of a decent level, one that has experienced all walks of human culture.

Or it could end up being schizophrenic.

Have you read the book "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter?

An excellent and entertaining book. But have you read his Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies - Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought?
It's not as entertaining a read (in fact it's extremely hard going in places!) but it's a 'must-have' for anyone serious about programming their AI from scratch.

Check it out at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465024750/

Then, statistics can measure how important or direct (how many times any one association is referred to) a link is,to give some law and order to the mass chaos of associations.

And you're going to program all these thousands (millions?) of statistical weightings by hand? I think you'd be better off with some sort of learning algorithms to adjust the association strengths as it runs. Indeed, Ally's response recycling is one such approach, but some broader processes that don't require user input at every step would be particularly useful - whether from transcript correction after the conversation, or the ability to feed preformatted conversations into her for analysis and deconstruction. I've always thought it's a shame Daisy and Billy can't eg: take a play, or a PF/IRC/MSN transcript and analyse the language use. It would be MUCH faster than having to spend hours having inane conversations while they learn.
Talking of Ally, do you want to announce her new home, or shall I?

I haven't read that one. I have a read part of Metamagical Themas.

I read that when it came out, but that's so long ago I don't remember it well now. I certainly enjoyed it at the time.
How I wish that he would publish another juicy book in the field. I've been waiting since Fluid Concepts came out (and that was ten years ago now I'm appalled to see, looking in the front of my copy!)
His only publications since then (bar a couple of essays) seem to be literary translations

Actually, ally does have the ability to read, analyze, and deconstruct text files (even I sometimes don't have the patience to sit there and teach her from scratch). the only drawback with that is the learning algorithm would miss out on the user's positive reinforcement, which should be done at an early stage before there is so much data that the chances of her saying something coherent go down.

And you're going to program all these thousands (millions?) of statistical weightings by hand?

that would be inpractical for a number of reasons, one being that any particular association would never be constant, they would always e changing as the entity grows. of course there would be a learning algorithm.

I tried out Watzer's sonnetplease, and I have to say, I am impressed. How is it done? Is there a way to detect if words rhyme? I did something like that with VB, detecting the last vowel in a word and using that and the rest of the word's consenants to make a simple rhyme detector, but how did you ever pull such a complex system off?

Announcing ALLY's homepage: http://www.be9.net/ally/index.htm

With thanks to psimagus for all your help