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Ask Dr. Richard Wallace, Artificial Intelligence Researcher
Today's interview guest is Dr. Richard Wallace, creator of the Alicebot and AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language). Suggestion: look through some of the pages about Wallace in the first (Google search) link above before you start posting questions. Then, please, stick to the usual "one question per post." After this post has been up for around 24 hours, we'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Wallace, and post his replies verbatim (except for minor HTML formatting) soon after he sends them to us.
Special Fun Interview Bonus:
There is a site, www.pandorabots.com, where you can make your own Alice-style bot. I created SlashWallace using (mostly) default information about Dr. Wallace that is already on pandorabots.com. It might be kind of fun to see how the bot's responses stack up against the answers from the real Dr. Wallace, eh?
This is interesting. How far has the A.I. Come since it's creation? Can it disguish between man and machine? And how does it deal with textal representaions of voice influx? HI! is different that Hi...
Oops! I did it again
How long do you feel it will be before AI is mainstream in the home? Such as a robot that will run around and pick up garbage, toys, etc. or something that can do random daily tasks for you, to name a couple.
My other sig is an import.
Ok so as I heard it last from one of the pages Dr. Richard Wallace was quoted on, A.I. was still not able to distinguish the difference between a man and a machine, with all the new technology since then is it now possible to do that?
Do you think that the ever increasing processing power will eventually enable us to fully simulate the human brain? What ramifications would this have for the A.I discipline?
Stop the brainwash
Dr. Wallace, what is your opinion on the concept that there may already have arisen true artificial intelligences that have gone unrecognized as such, because their processes are sufficiently 'other' that we do not have the capability to recognize them as intelligences?
Brazil has decided you're cute.
As I understand it, Alicebot uses a rather complex set of lists with Questions and Answers; which does not qualify as 'Real' AI to me. When do you think there will be Bots which do not rely on lists, but rather perform real reasoning (in neural nets, for example)?
Furthermore, do you believe that these interconnected lists of Questions and Answers will evolve into real reasoning over time (through increased complexity)?
-mz
(1.) Alice and most of Eliza's children breakdown at some point and become a great big laundry list of rules for dealing with specific minutae about language and intelligence in general. Are rule-based minutae where we will make progress in AI, or are we still waiting for something like the discovery of AI's DNA to spur a revolution?
(2.) I was thinking about Alice one day (fantasizing perhaps even) and I realized that a week point with such intelligence will be humor. How would one make a chatbot capable of understanding humor? Humor is off-the-cuff, it plays on the moment, it thwarts Grice's maxims. How do we cope with this?
(3.) Are unicellular organisms or even nucleic acids or their simulations for that matter intelligent? I don't want to start a debate a al Searle, but at what point does the approach towards the limit of a "brain" yeild intelligence?
Hi,
Bots have been in the making for years, but from what I've seen I found the mock "human interaction" to be more a gimic than a useful tool. In what ways do you see bots being most useful in the immediate future?
Kind Regards,
Rob
How long do you think it will be untill computers will be able to directally interface with the human mind and what kind of role will AI play in this?
Early AI assumed they could define the input output relations of their systems ignoring the details of the real world. I.e. people would write programs to pass the turing test. Wouldnt it make much more sense to build systems that learn from radio or video. Such systems might one day be able to learn to imitate people without any supervision.
Googlefight "Slashdot Troll" against "BSD is dying" 303:229. BSD thus cant die.
Neural networks usually degrade after sometime of "learning". Basically the computer can learn so much before it starts to "retard" because of physical hardware limitations. Do you think that quantum computing will help this; do you even think quantum computing is feasible for AI in general?
Just for fun, I asked slashwallace a shortened version of the question, do you think your response would differ?
Human: Historically AI has done poorly managing the public's expectations, do you think this will continue?
SlashWallace: Where did he get it?
Dr. Wallace,
If humanity succeeds in creating a concious AI, what rights do you think it should have? What kind of morality is there in turning off the computer it's running on? Or in deleting its files?
I would like to know how you feel about the integration of artificial intelligence into our society. Do you believe that, like electricity to many of us now, we will someday require artificial intelligence in our everyday lives (save a few exceptional groups), and do you believe this is a good thing?
Cheers!
Brian
ps. bonus question, food for thought: "who" gets the libel for AI decisions?
I have chatted with Alice, and it was quite interesting. However, the basis of Alice is flawed. Turing's test ultimately amounts to just a toy program. Alice is incapable of understanding any meaningful relationships. In my opinion, GPS was much more sophisticated than Alice will ever be because it is based on logic. What is your opinion?
Since I was about 10, I have been very interested in AI, and typed in a BASIC version of Eliza from a book a long time ago.
I'm wondering how much ALICE is an improvement on the fundamental design of ELIZA? Is it just a more complex ELIZA, or is there a real technology improvement involved? This question isn't to imply that ALICE isn't a major functional improvment over ELIZA, it's just a question of technology.
BTW, a fun thing to say to ALICE is 'your stupid', I love it's response:
I may be stupid, but at least I know the difference between "your" and "you're."
There has been a lot of criticism of the Alice bot because of it's "shallow" method of generating responses. i.e. it doesn't fundamentally understand the question being asked, it lacks the ability to form a creative response, the solution doesn't create an AI that can be applied to other significant problem spaces, etc. Does Alice bot really improve our understanding of intelligence or is it just yet another beep-blue-esque AI dead end?
How do you respond to people who say that things like ALICE are not "real" AI, they are simply parlor tricks, and they give us no further insight into the working of the brain or the nature of intelligence?
What do you think of people who attempt to build up a consciousness of intelligence from a top-down approach? It seems that your approach is more bottom-up, in other words, let's keep asking it questions, and when the responses diverge significantly from expected, we'll add new clarifiers.
This seems to me a little like growing ivy up a wall and putting stakes in it every time it strays from the path you intend. It works, but it requires event-to-event correction for a long time before it becomes stable.
Do you think that real artificial intelligence will come from this process, starting with a running dummy and stub methods, or from careful design and planning, so that in the end we can flip the switch and have a working prototype? Is ALICE a reflection of your beliefs or just an experiment?
or in that vein, artificial sense of humor?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Does the AliceBot combine different AI techiniques?
If so, what techniques does it combine and how?
If not, have you considered combining different techniques, and if so what were your conclusions, and why did you rule it out?
Specifically, have you considered or used any Bayesian network or decision theory techniques?
I would speculate that, as an enhancement to basic pattern matching, Bayesian network modeling might add power to disambiguation by dealing with uncertainties in a managable way, and decision theory techniques could help the bot choose between alternative courses of action based on its current objectives and definition of utility.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
Have you considered using an evolutionary technique such as genetic programming to test the fitness of AIML rules? Have you tried generating new rules from combinations of old rules via some crossover/mutation mechanism?
What do you think of efforts to "create" AI by collecting huge amounts of information, such as the Mindpixel and Cyc projects?
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
My question is, do you have a favourite commercial application you'd like to see AI used for?
Like a lot of R&D, I think that if you can get somebody interested in it as a money making/saving investment, advances will proceed quickly. I can see a few potential markets for this kind of thing, e.g. basic customer support via the phone: try to resolve some small % of calls, steer the rest to an actual person.We hear a lot about processing power, the number of "neurons" in a neural net, the Turing test, etc, but not so much about the actual nature of intelligence and self-awareness. That said, how much do Strange Loops and complex self-referenciality a la Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" factor into current AI theories and practice? Is the 20+ year-old thinking in this book still relevant? If not, what has changed about our understanding of the nature of intelligence and self-awareness?
Thank you Dr. W.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
I noticed that your AliceBot won the 2000 Loebner Prize for most human responses. My question is: "As an Artificial Intelligence researcher, do you feel that the Loebner Prize represents a legitimate variety of testing, or did you just want the $2000?"
I was pretty sure that almost all AI researchers came to the agreement about thirty years ago that the original imitation game as proposed by Turing in 1951 was useful only as a mental exercise, not in practice. Do you feel that the types of developments that the Loebner prize supports(intentional, hard-coded spelling mistakes, etc.) are actually productive in terms of the AI research project?
Ok... that kind of looks like two questions, but just pretend that I worded it better and made it one question.
lysergically yours
After you're done answering our questions, would you please feed the questions to one of your AIs so that we can compare your answers to its?
/. posted a few days ago...
For fun, post both sets of answers in randomized order* so that we can try to guess whether it was man or machine who answered.
*insert link to that random order statistics story that
[o]_O
Do you think a binary machine (like a main stream microprocessor), which is built on the concept of successively executed operations, has the capability to create human like thought, or is a unique hardware solution required?
"Understanding" an utterance usually means to perform various analysis steps. This involves a tremendous amount of (linguistic and) world knowledge.
A big issue among language technology researchers is whether this is necessary at all when bringing speech to computers. Is a dialog (or just a single natural language utterance) supposed to be deeply analyzed in terms of syntactic structure and its semantic and rhetorical contribution? The alternative is to apply statistical models and rather simple knowledge. Up to now, the latter systems are known to give quicker results.
RW, how much does a computer really need to know to make it a good replacement for a, say, sales clerk in a web shop?
Have you considered combining Alice with RDF/DAML and an inference engine?
[OT]
Some of us think you've been treated very shabbily by the mainstream academic community, I for one do appreciate your work, please keep it going, Signed A Big Fan
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Dr Wallace:
On what principles do we base our ethics concerning AI? If one day we do have AI that either matches or surpasses our own behavior and intellect, do we give computer software "rights"? Or, more importantly, if we do demonstrate that our human brains are nothing more than computational algorithms, how do we avoid having our rights reduced to that of computer programs?
Like the three blind men and the elephant, the definition of AI seems to shift depending on whom you talk to. To some, it's approximate reasoning, to others it's heuristics and analogical research, to others it's connectionism, and to still others it's whatever we're not sure how to do yet.
So, what does the term AI mean to you and what do you see as the next big application of AI techniques?
That is all.
So here is my question. It relates to the "Measure of a Man" episode of ST:TNG. In the episode we are confronted with the idea that at some point AI, will have to be recognized as a life form. If we do not then one could say that we have simply created a slave race of robots. Do you agree with this concept, and at one point would you think that AI's stop being property to do and at as we will, and instead become "life" to do and act as they will?
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Hello Dr. Wallace,
If human consciousness is in fact little more than a constant state of awareness in a complex context (my definition), do you think a machine can achieve the same level of "consciousness" as humans without a comparably complex context in which to be aware?
Thanks for your thoughts.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Have you had the opportunity to study so-called AI used in computer video games ? Do you think they are of any interest ? Do video game programmer innovate on that front ?
I personnally know next-to-nothing about AI; video games are the only products I use that claim artificial intelligence. I am just wondering how valide the technique used in video games are in regard to the academic research on the subject.
:wq
If you had to put a date on the singularity, what would it be ?
Dr Wallace,
The New York Times bio stated that you smoked five joints a day to help alleviate depression. Do you think the pot smoking in general, aside from the medical benefits, has helped you create the ALICE characters? And what's it like to write code while spaced out out cannabis?
The AI community seem to have focused on the big prize - trying to get right out to human-like intelligence through one trick poneys, like the over-publicized neutral networks. Whatever happened to the low hanging apples?
There is the first thing my Phd adviser taught me: If you cannot solve your problem, find a partial formulation, a simpler midstep. Try to solve that instead. If you still cannot, break it down some more and repeat until you can.
Amongst the promising bottom-up approaches, I noticed Bayesian Decision Networks, Common sence databases and perhaps the whole field of natural language processing. What are, according to you, the leading attempts at breaking the Hard AI problem into components?
This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
There is a fascinating gap between optimal behavior and animal behavior. Assuming realistic AI is possible, at what point do you feel we have reached some minimally accurate representation? When the AI systems perform with reasoning capabilities of any sort, when they perform with optimal reasoning capabilities, or when they perform with capabilities similar to humans?
I've begun to study A.I. myself and have noticed that the field is very vaguely defined. The name itself suggests some mystical programming that allows a computer to exceed its original capabilities and do the extraordinary, such as gain self-awareness, given a big enough machine.
I'll be more direct. I've noticed that people who consider themselves part of A.I. will work in these broad, sweeping, general areas:
expert systems
search algorithms
nonlinear classifiers (neural nets, SVMs etc.)
Which of these areas do you think holds the key to the most development; which do you think will lead to the greatest breakthoughs, or which OTHER area, if you think I've missed something?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
What are your perceptions of the Cyc project by Cycorp and Doug Lenat. Do you feel that hard coded common sense is needed for useful Artificial Intelligence or not?
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Has your work on AI led you to any conclusions about the nature of human intelligence? Specifically, do you see any parallels between the way AI is being developed and possible mechanisms for the emergence of intelligence in humans and other animals?