You're right -- that was a bit of a flippant remark on my part; sorry.
I guess I should confess a certain zeal for the minimalist approach of Alicebot, which is all about dumping conventional NLP and AI techniques out the window, and going whole-hog instead for a really hardcore stimulus-response model. The typical reaction people have to this approach is to say "Isn't that just like Eliza?", to which the answer is "Yes, but several orders of magnitude smarter"...followed by a long explanation (there's a lot on the site).
I didn't invent this, Richard Wallace did. But I have to admit a certain enthusiasm for the approach, which sometimes leads me to be a little over-energetic in making claims about it.
I guess for me the point about "really works" is framed by the Turing Test -- and that is certainly a presumption that ought to be stated up front. Alice won last year's Loebner Prize, which although not an exact implementation of Turing's original experiment is the closest thing the world has right now. In that contest, the main goal is to imitate a human (in Turing's proposal, the goal was a little more constrained and had a scientific control attached). Anything that does reasonably well on that score can be said to "work", from one point of view: a more empirical one. Of course, from other points of view (and there sure are many!), anything that doesn't incorporate structures/concepts/rules that are generally conceived of as being more closely analogous to brain functionality (neural networks for instance) is off the mark.
So Alicebot has absolutely no neural network, no notion of a lexicon, etc. AIML is about as simple as you can get. This confuses people sometimes -- as though Wallace & others working on this somehow "overlooked" the need for a "learning" mechanism or a syntactic parser or a link with an "ontology of common sense" or what-have-you. In point of fact, Alicebot is just actively rejecting most other approaches, based not only on the disappointing results that they've generally produced, but also just on the premise that it might be (and has proved to be) interesting to pursue this particular, minimal, pattern-matching-based approach. Clearly no approach has "won" hands-down, but Alicebot has certainly proved a lot with a lot less financial backing than some projects (like Cyc). Time will tell...and framing the question better will help (which is what I failed to do in my response -- sorry, one more time;-) ).
In what way is this relevant to the thread? Far worse than any deficiencies in coding which you may wish to criticize are sociopathic behaviors like your own, in which you disrupt a shared public discussion context with a lengthy off-topic rant. Presumably the Web is "big enough" for you to pursue your crusade elsewhere.
I agree it's unsightly and unnecessary. But as you must have noticed after posting your reply, people aren't adding these -- this is the slashdot software that's doing us the, um, favor.
You'll find little of the new age nonsense about the "singularity" there, too -- just a straightforward, minimalist approach to handling conversation that won the Loebner Prize last year.
I like the idea that this computer is necessary in order to "simulate how the nation's aging nuclear weapons arsenal would function if launched". Perhaps this means we could just fight the whole nuclear war inside a few of these machines.
It's worth pointing out that most of the dialogue is only "fascinating" if you accept the clumsy application of copyright to electronic works. Surely it isn't necessary here to reiterate why copyright is so grossly inapplicable to electronic works.
Or is it still necessary? While people have been offering well-constructed arguments against copyright for years, "progress" marches on, in the shape of lawyers and their loopy discussions about the "unexplored terrain" of "encrypted token servers". Look, if copyright law makes it illegal to copy work X, then everybody who participates, even unknowingly, is liable -- somehow or another. There is no question of finagling some workaround through encryption or any other scheme...sooner or later the copyright owner is going to come knocking. The real, unresolved questions, are still about whether copyright can be reformed or replaced with something that fits the technology space we live in.
This only shows how words like "worm" and "virus" are inadequate metaphors already stretched to the breaking point. The fact is that a worm or a virus or any other piece of software is not a separate entity that "goes out and does something" -- it is you. If you write a worm that is meant to propagate through the net and alter something on other people's property, it's you that is doing all the damage, not the worm. Any computer program is just a cybernetic extension of your own limited capabilities to make decisions and take actions.
Vigilantism is generally considered to be an enemy of a civil society. You have no more right to trespass onto other people's property to battle a worm-writer than the worm-writer has the right to do the initial trespassing. The implicit agreement among system administrators across the net that hacking to find security holes is an acceptable and beneficial exercise is long gone, ever since the net became a commercial field. A commercial field has a different structure of trust, one in which vigilantism can play no part.
This is an example of the kind of attitude that keeps corporate users unhappy with their technical support. It's not right to assume that just because you can't imagine the causal connection between (your example) Office 97 and a printing problem that there isn't one. Haven't you personally had many experiences in which changing one variable (say, plugging a printer into a different USB port) immediately precedes something else, seemingly unrelated, "breaking"? No matter how fastidious you are, no matter what operating system you're using, an OS + thousands of programs + all the variability in hardware configurations in the world is far too complex a system for you to intuitively know whether the report of a problem's apparent cause is right.
If you're in a service profession, your job is to serve -- to assume that your customers are reporting, to the best of their ability, what they understand about the situation, and to use the information they give you, however flawed, to find the source of the problem. Up with "stupid users", I say.
The argument that this company shipped more than 13 million units is hardly support for the premise that they can't screw up. And it's a cop-out to lay the blame at the feet of pejoratively-labaled "users". Both the computer hardware and software industries get away with far too little responsibility to ensure quality in their products.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right -- that was a bit of a flippant remark on my part; sorry.
I guess I should confess a certain zeal for the minimalist approach of Alicebot, which is all about dumping conventional NLP and AI techniques out the window, and going whole-hog instead for a really hardcore stimulus-response model. The typical reaction people have to this approach is to say "Isn't that just like Eliza?", to which the answer is "Yes, but several orders of magnitude smarter"...followed by a long explanation (there's a lot on the site).
I didn't invent this, Richard Wallace did. But I have to admit a certain enthusiasm for the approach, which sometimes leads me to be a little over-energetic in making claims about it.
I guess for me the point about "really works" is framed by the Turing Test -- and that is certainly a presumption that ought to be stated up front. Alice won last year's Loebner Prize, which although not an exact implementation of Turing's original experiment is the closest thing the world has right now. In that contest, the main goal is to imitate a human (in Turing's proposal, the goal was a little more constrained and had a scientific control attached). Anything that does reasonably well on that score can be said to "work", from one point of view: a more empirical one. Of course, from other points of view (and there sure are many!), anything that doesn't incorporate structures/concepts/rules that are generally conceived of as being more closely analogous to brain functionality (neural networks for instance) is off the mark.
So Alicebot has absolutely no neural network, no notion of a lexicon, etc. AIML is about as simple as you can get. This confuses people sometimes -- as though Wallace & others working on this somehow "overlooked" the need for a "learning" mechanism or a syntactic parser or a link with an "ontology of common sense" or what-have-you. In point of fact, Alicebot is just actively rejecting most other approaches, based not only on the disappointing results that they've generally produced, but also just on the premise that it might be (and has proved to be) interesting to pursue this particular, minimal, pattern-matching-based approach. Clearly no approach has "won" hands-down, but Alicebot has certainly proved a lot with a lot less financial backing than some projects (like Cyc). Time will tell...and framing the question better will help (which is what I failed to do in my response -- sorry, one more time ;-) ).
Noel
In what way is this relevant to the thread? Far worse than any deficiencies in coding which you may wish to criticize are sociopathic behaviors like your own, in which you disrupt a shared public discussion context with a lengthy off-topic rant. Presumably the Web is "big enough" for you to pursue your crusade elsewhere.
I agree it's unsightly and unnecessary. But as you must have noticed after posting your reply, people aren't adding these -- this is the slashdot software that's doing us the, um, favor.
AI software that actually works is available free at http://alicebot.org.
You'll find little of the new age nonsense about the "singularity" there, too -- just a straightforward, minimalist approach to handling conversation that won the Loebner Prize last year.
Kino Coursey, one of the participants in the Alicebot/AIML project (see http://alicebot.org/bios/kinocoursey.html has already started porting Alice to the AIBO.
I like the idea that this computer is necessary in order to "simulate how the nation's aging nuclear weapons arsenal would function if launched". Perhaps this means we could just fight the whole nuclear war inside a few of these machines.
It's worth pointing out that most of the dialogue is only "fascinating" if you accept the clumsy application of copyright to electronic works. Surely it isn't necessary here to reiterate why copyright is so grossly inapplicable to electronic works.
Or is it still necessary? While people have been offering well-constructed arguments against copyright for years, "progress" marches on, in the shape of lawyers and their loopy discussions about the "unexplored terrain" of "encrypted token servers". Look, if copyright law makes it illegal to copy work X, then everybody who participates, even unknowingly, is liable -- somehow or another. There is no question of finagling some workaround through encryption or any other scheme...sooner or later the copyright owner is going to come knocking. The real, unresolved questions, are still about whether copyright can be reformed or replaced with something that fits the technology space we live in.
This only shows how words like "worm" and "virus" are inadequate metaphors already stretched to the breaking point. The fact is that a worm or a virus or any other piece of software is not a separate entity that "goes out and does something" -- it is you. If you write a worm that is meant to propagate through the net and alter something on other people's property, it's you that is doing all the damage, not the worm. Any computer program is just a cybernetic extension of your own limited capabilities to make decisions and take actions.
Vigilantism is generally considered to be an enemy of a civil society. You have no more right to trespass onto other people's property to battle a worm-writer than the worm-writer has the right to do the initial trespassing. The implicit agreement among system administrators across the net that hacking to find security holes is an acceptable and beneficial exercise is long gone, ever since the net became a commercial field. A commercial field has a different structure of trust, one in which vigilantism can play no part.
This is an example of the kind of attitude that keeps corporate users unhappy with their technical support. It's not right to assume that just because you can't imagine the causal connection between (your example) Office 97 and a printing problem that there isn't one. Haven't you personally had many experiences in which changing one variable (say, plugging a printer into a different USB port) immediately precedes something else, seemingly unrelated, "breaking"? No matter how fastidious you are, no matter what operating system you're using, an OS + thousands of programs + all the variability in hardware configurations in the world is far too complex a system for you to intuitively know whether the report of a problem's apparent cause is right.
If you're in a service profession, your job is to serve -- to assume that your customers are reporting, to the best of their ability, what they understand about the situation, and to use the information they give you, however flawed, to find the source of the problem. Up with "stupid users", I say.
The argument that this company shipped more than 13 million units is hardly support for the premise that they can't screw up. And it's a cop-out to lay the blame at the feet of pejoratively-labaled "users". Both the computer hardware and software industries get away with far too little responsibility to ensure quality in their products.