I can't believe those dumb Slashdot editors accepted this story but rejected my very interesting proposed story about the 10th anniversary gathering of A.L.I.C.E. and chat bot enthusiasts who gathered at Guildford, U.K. last week for a serious colloquim on conversational systems. See http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Computer_professionals _celebrate_10th_birthday_of_A.L.I.C.E.
I hate to post the same message twice, but the conversations copied from the free ALICE on http://www.alicebot.org/ here don't prove anything, because the bot used in the Imitation Game was the ALICE Silver Edition available by joining the AI Foundation at http://www.alicebot.org/join.html.
All the folks taking the time to cut and paste transcripts from the free ALICE on www.alicebot.org to make there points here, should read the description of the Simon Rock experiment where says that it was ALICE Silver Edition http://www.alicebot.org/join.html, not the free ALICE bot, that participated in the Imitation Game. So the transcripts, when they are released, will be different.
The ALICE AI Foundation http://www.alicebot.org/ supports the development and adoption of free AIML software and standards for natural language chat robot technology. The ALICE brain, available freely under the GNU public license, is the three time winner of the prestigious Loebner prize for "most human computer" in a contest based on the Turing Test. One of the most interesting AIML implementations, Program N http://www.aimlpad.com/ by Gary Dubuque with contributions by Kino Coursey, already incorporates OpenCyc and WordNet into the ALICE conversational interface.
The Foundation derives income from individual and corporate memberships, bot subscriptions, books, the Foundation directory, consulting, teaching, awards, Google ads, gifts and donations. We have never accepted one dime of DARPA or other government sponsorship.
(repost of an older comment from the cited interview)
Imagine Slashdot. Imagine that only Ph.D.'s were allowed to post articles and comments. Imagine that all the comments were posted by Anonymous Cowards. Imagine that if enough Anonymous Cowards got together, they could take your original article down altogether. Now imagine that instead of the internet, we use photocopies, printing presses, and the postal service to communicate. This is called "academic peer review." This is how science "works".
I'm beginning to appreciate the advantages of this open source trial by a jury of my peer reviewers, especially the ones who are not Anonymous Cowards.
Some of the best comments about the Slashdot Interview on http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/0 7/26/0332225
"If you can't find a useful quote in this interview to use as a sig, you're weak... really weak."
"this is the *BEST* interview I've ever read on/. bar none."
"there is some serious doubt on this very forum whether this is ALICE or the good Doctor."
"He does a good job off coming off as a troll without his very own impersonator."
"This was one of the best/. interviews I've ever read. This guy is a genius."
"this man is brilliant and i only wish he had written more."
"Great interview. Probably the best I've ever read on Slashdot (and I'll definitely come back eventually to read everything I glazed over). Does anyone else think it's strange that the leading AI researcher in the world is a self described 'mental patient?'"
"This is honestly one of the best interviews, or literary pieces I have ever read. He is one of the most though provoking people I've read, and I'd honestly like to meet the man."
"I think the man is rather smart - either he's got us all thinking he is ALICE, or he's actually got us thinking ALICE is him. Either way, he's won."
"I have much more respect for Wallace after reading this reply. He's a deeply insightful individual and doesn't appear to be taken in by much of the bullshit of the AI field."
"Goddamn, what a thoughtful set of paragraphs. This is the first slashdot article I've decided to print. I don't care about the length."
"who knew an AI specialist could be such a skilled writer. amazing interview."
"I, for one, am glad of the fact that he is shedding some light on the subject of mental illness."
"The insights on AI, particularly, the digression into the functions of AIML for A.L.I.C.E were wonderful in this interview."
"Hello, my name is Bean. When I was one I escaped slaughter at the hands of my creators and hid in a toilet. I then went on to help destroy an alien race and place this guy Peter I know on the throne of the Earth."
Join the A.L.I.C.E. AI Foundation
Join the A. L. I. C. E. Artificial Intelligence Foundation
for only $100 per year
(*** or only $30.00 for youth, students, seniors or disabled *** )
The ALICE A.I. Foundation is a non-profit research and training organization devoted to the development and adoption of AIML, the artificial intelligence markup language.
Your membership in the A. I. Foundation brings you:
One year of unlimited chat with the A.L.I.C.E. Silver Edition, the most advanced version of the award winning A.I. chat robot by Dr. Rich Wallace. "Much sharper than plain ALICE...Alice Silver is impressive. Her curiosity, leaves you with the eerie feeling she might develop consciousness someday...someday soon." --Peter Plantec, Virtual Personalties, Inc., SYLVIE botmaster A Beautiful Membership Certificate designed by Sage Greco suitable for framing and printing. An invitation to the exclusive members only Foundation meetings online, where you can have your technical questions answered by top A.I. scientists. Subscription to the A.I. Foundation Newsletter, with technical information and news published ahead of the Foundation's free mailing list and web site. Learn how to make money by starting your own subscription based bot business. "Thanks for all the cool stuff."--A.I. Foundation member. Or chat with the free ALICE bot at
Your bot subscription will normally start within 24-36 hours. Note: Membership and subscription to Silver ALICE is a donation to the ALICE A.I. Foundation, a nonprofit charity. Sorry, no refunds.
I can't believe people are falling for this. He obviously didn't answer the questions. This was obviously a bot writing the answers. Now the bot is even writing his own questions too! I can't believe Slashdot is letting these people get away with this. When are they going to start making real human beings answer the questions. First Wallace, now this!
Justin, I diagnose you as one of those rare enlightened mathematicians I was talking about. Your H may be too close to M for you to tell the difference any more. I prescribe medical marijuana, and quit your academic job:-)
Seriously, let's interrogate Joe Dirt about the same subject:
I: You say you like candy? J: Yes, sir. I: But you hate chocalate. J: Yeah. I: But a lot of candy is chocolate. J: So? I: It's a contradiction J: A what? I: A logical inconsitency. J: What are we talking about again? I: You can't like canday and hate chocolate. J: Why not? I: Some candy is chocolate. J: I know. I: Therefore, you contradicted yourself. J: Oh, O.K. I: So you agree. J: I guess so. I: Great. Do you want a candy bar? J: No thanks. That's chocolate.
Joe Dirt J doesn't exactly whip out the Symbolic Logic book, pull down the Lisp manual and show off his knowledge of Western Philosophy, eh?
His foreground logic H(J) is totally inconsistent. We are not even sure J is convinced by the end of his own inconsistency. Yet J is clearly "sane". His background logic M(J) remains intact. This is what enables him to recognize the inputs and give coherent, believable replies at all.
Let's call the universal mathematics M and the human-sprung mathematics H.
Excellent notation. I have been developing a similar idea in conversations, where I call M the "background logic" and H the "foreground logic". The idea sprang from the observation that almost all of us, including robots, apparently have no problem maintaining inconsistent beliefs, yet remain "sane." Except perhaps for a few great mathematicians, each human being (or robot) x has its own flawed, imperfect, and above all inconsistent H(x). This is like the AIML content of the robot brain. It doesn't really matter if one template says "I like candy" and another one says "I hate chocolate." But in order for the bot-brain to function at all, M must be intact. The background logic of pattern recognition, matching, recursion, and axiomatic set theory are absolutely essential. When M(x) breaks down, we have severe mental illness.
OK I will explain the joke. I am like the Japanese Defense Minister. ALICE answering the questions is like the unfinished Atomic Bomb. We don't have that technology just yet, but if we really needed it, we could probably put it together in a few days. In fact I showed everyone how it would be done right here.
All the remarks about "the bot answered the questions" brought to mind the old story about the Japanese Defense Minister who was asked a direct question by a reproter.
Q: It has been said that Japan could build an atomic bomb in 30 days if it needed to. Is this true? A: (short pause) Yes, it might take that long.
ALICE is basically the high-tech version of a victorian etiquette book. It hears a response, then flips itself to the page with the appropriate response. Sad.
Is the EFF really about defending free speech? Or is this just a battle between rich lawyers and record companies and the rich kids who want to rip them off?
I used to think it was totally about free speech, until I ran into this rich kid Dave Touretsky.
I decided to change the name of the thread. It looks nicer this way. The guy gave us the GNU License for Lord's sake, which begat Linux, and a million other wonderful things. Not to mention all the other "GNU/Linux" goodies, and why it so hard to even give someone a compliment for his contribution in free software.
I hug RMS. After being worked over by the low end of the Slashdot gene pool myself, my esteem for him has only increased. Fight the good fight, and remember, we are here for Freedom and History and not for what a bunch of dweebs think about us or "how we look".
I have a ton of sympathy for this guy, even though he does seem to hold some lingering resentment toward artificial intelligence, perhaps leftover from MIT, but he shouldn't associate me with that sorry crowd. We have a mutual friend named HPM.
> In all the classes that I have taken I haven't seen such an excitement for this kind of material.
Around the time I started working on ALICE, I went to a bar in Easton, PA with Ken Goldberg. It was called "The Old Stone Inn." The theme was simple: cheap drinks and live music. After a few beers, we met this guy playing drums for the band. He was really into it, man. He loved playing that drum like nothing you ever saw. I commented to Ken, "I wish I had such passion for my work."
ALICE was the first A.I. or science project I found where I could even approximate the passion of that skinny punk drummer from Easton, Pennsylvania.
A lot of people of a certain personality type reacted the way you did. But other people say I was correct to use my shot at the press to get my message across. Personally I think if you read all the answers, they did answer all the questions, and then some. I tried to answer a lot of the questions among the ones people submitted, but didn't make it to the top 10.
1. Problem of feathers (this is where "free flight" would fall).
2. Weight issue: can our weight (with mass x) fly in a machine heavier than x, or at least x? Or, just like in proving the Celestial Spheres, do we need a higher order system?
3. Reduction of experience/quality. I believe experience of flight (stuff like flapping wings, trimming feathers, static stability.) is a part of a human like flying system, and I yet to see any meaningful explanation of it without going into metaphysics. (arms are NOT wings, internal combustion is NOT food....)
Okay, credibility++, trust++. And I will let you off the hook under the Rule of Exception for Citizens of the U.K.:-)
I don't have a printer. Sometimes people kindly mail me printouts of interesting reports so I can read them more easily. You can contact me personally at drwallace@alicebot.org for a mailing address.
PETA Rules. I can't mention God at an academic conference without getting funny looks. I don't trust the politicized reports and experiments upon which most of your arguments are based. The mere fact that you are even apparently employed in the scientific establishment makes me suspicious, unless you are offering me a job too. Now, how do we begin to have a dialogue?
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, A.L.I.C.E. has already been integrated with OpenCyc. Check out Program N and CyN on the http://www.alicebot.org/downloads page.
I can't believe those dumb Slashdot editors accepted this story but rejected my very interesting proposed story about the 10th anniversary gathering of A.L.I.C.E. and chat bot enthusiasts who gathered at Guildford, U.K. last week for a serious colloquim on conversational systems. See http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Computer_professionals _celebrate_10th_birthday_of_A.L.I.C.E.
I hate to post the same message twice, but the conversations copied from the free ALICE on http://www.alicebot.org/ here don't prove anything, because the bot used in the Imitation Game was the ALICE Silver Edition available by joining the AI Foundation at http://www.alicebot.org/join.html.
BTW, how does one start a new top-level thread?
All the folks taking the time to cut and paste transcripts from the free ALICE on www.alicebot.org to make there points here, should read the description of the Simon Rock experiment where says that it was ALICE Silver Edition http://www.alicebot.org/join.html, not the free ALICE bot, that participated in the Imitation Game. So the transcripts, when they are released, will be different.
http://www.alicebot.org/Treo650.html
You can already have a chat with ALICE on a Palm computer.
The ALICE AI Foundation http://www.alicebot.org/ supports the development and adoption of free AIML software and standards for natural language chat robot technology. The ALICE brain, available freely under the GNU public license, is the three time winner of the prestigious Loebner prize for "most human computer" in a contest based on the Turing Test. One of the most interesting AIML implementations, Program N http://www.aimlpad.com/ by Gary Dubuque with contributions by Kino Coursey, already incorporates OpenCyc and WordNet into the ALICE conversational interface. The Foundation derives income from individual and corporate memberships, bot subscriptions, books, the Foundation directory, consulting, teaching, awards, Google ads, gifts and donations. We have never accepted one dime of DARPA or other government sponsorship.
(repost of an older comment from the cited interview)
Imagine Slashdot. Imagine that only Ph.D.'s were allowed to post articles and comments. Imagine that all the comments were posted by Anonymous Cowards. Imagine that if enough Anonymous Cowards got together, they could take your original article down altogether. Now imagine that instead of the internet, we use photocopies, printing presses, and the postal service to communicate. This is called "academic peer review." This is how science "works".
I'm beginning to appreciate the advantages of this open source trial by a jury of my peer reviewers, especially the ones who are not Anonymous Cowards.
Dr. Rich
I wrote this article after visiting the Turing statue in Manchester last year:
Alan Turing Statue in Manchester, England
Some of the best comments about the Slashdot Interview on http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/0 7/26/0332225
/. bar none."
/. interviews I've ever read. This guy is a genius."
5 d9 22d97e345aa1
"If you can't find a useful quote in this interview to use as a sig, you're weak... really weak."
"this is the *BEST* interview I've ever read on
"there is some serious doubt on this very forum whether this is ALICE or the good Doctor."
"He does a good job off coming off as a troll without his very own impersonator."
"This was one of the best
"this man is brilliant and i only wish he had written more."
"Great interview. Probably the best I've ever read on Slashdot (and I'll definitely come back eventually to read everything I glazed over). Does anyone else think it's strange that the leading AI researcher in the world is a self described 'mental patient?'"
"This is honestly one of the best interviews, or literary pieces I have ever read. He is one of the most though provoking people I've read, and I'd honestly like to meet the man."
"I think the man is rather smart - either he's got us all thinking he is ALICE, or he's actually got us thinking ALICE is him. Either way, he's won."
"I have much more respect for Wallace after reading this reply. He's a deeply insightful individual and doesn't appear to be taken in by much of the bullshit of the AI field."
"Goddamn, what a thoughtful set of paragraphs. This is the first slashdot article I've decided to print. I don't care about the length."
"who knew an AI specialist could be such a skilled writer. amazing interview."
"I, for one, am glad of the fact that he is shedding some light on the subject of mental illness."
"The insights on AI, particularly, the digression into the functions of AIML for A.L.I.C.E were wonderful in this interview."
"Hello, my name is Bean. When I was one I escaped slaughter at the hands of my creators and hid in a toilet. I then went on to help destroy an alien race and place this guy Peter I know on the throne of the Earth."
Join the A.L.I.C.E. AI Foundation
Join the A. L. I. C. E. Artificial Intelligence Foundation
for only $100 per year
(*** or only $30.00 for youth, students, seniors or disabled *** )
The ALICE A.I. Foundation is a non-profit research and training organization devoted to the development and adoption of AIML, the artificial intelligence markup language.
Your membership in the A. I. Foundation brings you:
One year of unlimited chat with the A.L.I.C.E. Silver Edition, the most advanced version of the award winning A.I. chat robot by Dr. Rich Wallace.
"Much sharper than plain ALICE...Alice Silver is impressive. Her curiosity, leaves you with the eerie feeling she might develop consciousness someday...someday soon." --Peter Plantec, Virtual Personalties, Inc., SYLVIE botmaster
A Beautiful Membership Certificate designed by Sage Greco suitable for framing and printing.
An invitation to the exclusive members only Foundation meetings online, where you can have your technical questions answered by top A.I. scientists.
Subscription to the A.I. Foundation Newsletter, with technical information and news published ahead of the Foundation's free mailing list and web site. Learn how to make money by starting your own subscription based bot business.
"Thanks for all the cool stuff."--A.I. Foundation member.
Or chat with the free ALICE bot at
http://www.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk?botid=f
Your bot subscription will normally start within 24-36 hours. Note: Membership and subscription to Silver ALICE is a donation to the ALICE A.I. Foundation, a nonprofit charity. Sorry, no refunds.
http://Www.AliceBot.Org/join.html
I can't believe people are falling for this. He obviously didn't answer the questions. This was obviously a bot writing the answers. Now the bot is even writing his own questions too! I can't believe Slashdot is letting these people get away with this. When are they going to start making real human beings answer the questions. First Wallace, now this!
Dr. Rich
Wonder when the Luddites are going to come after you with pitchforks and torches?
They sort of did already, with restraining orders and lawyers.
Justin, I diagnose you as one of those rare enlightened mathematicians I was talking about. Your H may be too close to M for you to tell the difference any more. I prescribe medical marijuana, and quit your academic job :-)
Seriously, let's interrogate Joe Dirt about the same subject:
I: You say you like candy?
J: Yes, sir.
I: But you hate chocalate.
J: Yeah.
I: But a lot of candy is chocolate.
J: So?
I: It's a contradiction
J: A what?
I: A logical inconsitency.
J: What are we talking about again?
I: You can't like canday and hate chocolate.
J: Why not?
I: Some candy is chocolate.
J: I know.
I: Therefore, you contradicted yourself.
J: Oh, O.K.
I: So you agree.
J: I guess so.
I: Great. Do you want a candy bar?
J: No thanks. That's chocolate.
Joe Dirt J doesn't exactly whip out the Symbolic Logic book, pull down the Lisp manual and show off his knowledge of Western Philosophy, eh?
His foreground logic H(J) is totally inconsistent. We are not even sure J is convinced by the end of his own inconsistency. Yet J is clearly "sane". His background logic M(J) remains intact. This is what enables him to recognize the inputs and give coherent, believable replies at all.
Do you see me point?
Let's call the universal mathematics M and the human-sprung mathematics H.
Excellent notation. I have been developing a similar idea in conversations, where I call M the "background logic" and H the "foreground logic". The idea sprang from the observation that almost all of us, including robots, apparently have no problem maintaining inconsistent beliefs, yet remain "sane." Except perhaps for a few great mathematicians, each human being (or robot) x has its own flawed, imperfect, and above all inconsistent H(x). This is like the AIML content of the robot brain. It doesn't really matter if one template says "I like candy" and another one says "I hate chocolate." But in order for the bot-brain to function at all, M must be intact. The background logic of pattern recognition, matching, recursion, and axiomatic set theory are absolutely essential. When M(x) breaks down, we have severe mental illness.
Dr. Rich
OK I will explain the joke. I am like the Japanese Defense Minister. ALICE answering the questions is like the unfinished Atomic Bomb. We don't have that technology just yet, but if we really needed it, we could probably put it together in a few days. In fact I showed everyone how it would be done right
here.
Bless you.
All the remarks about "the bot answered the questions" brought to mind the old story about the Japanese Defense Minister who was asked a direct question by a reproter.
Q: It has been said that Japan could build an atomic bomb in 30 days if it needed to. Is this true?
A: (short pause) Yes, it might take that long.
Dr. Rich
When I was your age, we had to walk two miles to smoke pot and have sex.
ALICE is basically the high-tech version of a victorian etiquette book. It hears a response, then flips itself to the page with the appropriate response. Sad.
What a beautiful metaphor. I'm not sad at all.
Dr. Rich
Is the EFF really about defending free speech? Or is this just a battle between rich lawyers and record companies and the rich kids who want to rip them off?
I used to think it was totally about free speech, until I ran into this rich kid Dave Touretsky.
Dr. Rich
I decided to change the name of the thread. It looks nicer this way. The guy gave us the GNU License for Lord's sake, which begat Linux, and a million other wonderful things. Not to mention all the other "GNU/Linux" goodies, and why it so hard to even give someone a compliment for his contribution in free software.
I hug RMS. After being worked over by the low end of the Slashdot gene pool myself, my esteem for him has only increased. Fight the good fight, and remember, we are here for Freedom and History and not for what a bunch of dweebs think about us or "how we look".
Dr. Rich
I have a ton of sympathy for this guy, even though he does seem to hold some lingering resentment toward artificial intelligence, perhaps leftover from MIT, but he shouldn't associate me with that sorry crowd. We have a mutual friend named HPM.
Dr. Rich (RSW)
> In all the classes that I have taken I haven't seen such an excitement for this kind of material.
Around the time I started working on ALICE, I went to a bar in Easton, PA with Ken Goldberg. It was called "The Old Stone Inn." The theme was simple: cheap drinks and live music. After a few beers, we met this guy playing drums for the band. He was really into it, man. He loved playing that drum like nothing you ever saw. I commented to Ken, "I wish I had such passion for my work."
ALICE was the first A.I. or science project I found where I could even approximate the passion of that skinny punk drummer from Easton, Pennsylvania.
Dr. Rich
Re: He didn't answer the questions.
A lot of people of a certain personality type reacted the way you did. But other people say I was correct to use my shot at the press to get my message across. Personally I think if you read all the answers, they did answer all the
questions, and then some. I tried to answer a lot of the questions among the ones people submitted, but didn't make it to the top 10.
1. Problem of feathers (this is where "free flight" would fall).
2. Weight issue: can our weight (with mass x) fly in a machine heavier than x, or at least x? Or, just like in proving the Celestial Spheres, do we need a higher order system?
3. Reduction of experience/quality. I believe experience of flight (stuff like flapping wings, trimming feathers, static stability.) is a part of a human like flying system, and I yet to see any meaningful explanation of it without going into metaphysics. (arms are NOT wings, internal combustion is NOT food....)
Okay, credibility++, trust++. And I will let you off the hook under the Rule of Exception for Citizens of the U.K. :-)
I don't have a printer. Sometimes people kindly mail me printouts of interesting reports so I can read them more easily. You can contact me personally at drwallace@alicebot.org for a mailing address.
Dr. Rich
PETA Rules. I can't mention God at an academic conference without getting funny looks. I don't trust the politicized reports and experiments upon which most of your arguments are based. The mere fact that you are even apparently employed in the scientific establishment makes me suspicious, unless you are offering me a job too. Now, how do we begin to have a dialogue?
Dr. Rich