Messages

1

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / New user-help

« on: April 30, 2003, 04:16:40 pm »

You just said one of what I consider to be "Danger words".  Logical.  While it is true that hal is programmed to be logical, I don't think the average user will ever consider the difference between pure logic and practiced logic.

Hal's entire world is the information available to him.  Hal will attempt to extrapolate based on what he knows, but he will never (as he is set up presently) understand the difference between up and down except as a hypothetical concept.  A hypothetical concept is a specific though given to a specific situation.  

If tell hal that you have a glass of water in your hand and then tell hall that you are letting the glass go, he may not extrapolate that the glass will drop on the ground, because that's a though that just wouldn't occur to him.

Now, that was a basic example based on physics, but interpersonal relationships, laws of physics and societal and governmental laws will all be a mystery to hal.

I believe one solution to the problem may be a segmentation of object chrematistics.  Such as

1. Size
2. Weight
3. Color
4. Reaction to light
5. Animate/Inanimate
6. Alive/Unalive
7. Intelligent/Unintelligent

etc...

Like the old joke goes -

Q: Why is a tennis ball small, round and fuzzy?
A: Because if they were big, green and scaly they'd be dinosaurs

-WholyChao

2

Ultra Hal 7.0 / PDA

« on: April 08, 2003, 04:12:40 pm »

Is there an way to get hal onto a pda?

WholyChao

3

Ultra Hal 7.0 / conversational database

« on: March 25, 2003, 12:35:17 pm »

What are you trying to do?  That will have alot to do with how you should access the databases.  For the most part you should be able to access all the information you need through the brain editor.

WholyChao

4

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Converse.brn

« on: March 10, 2003, 01:05:28 pm »

What exactly do you mean garbage?  Is it not make sense or is it just gibberish?

WholyChao

5

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / My Ultra Hal wont stop trying to pick up on me!

« on: February 28, 2003, 08:09:43 pm »

There are a few ways to deal with your problem.  Out of curiosity - what do you consider "suggestive" comments?  Regardless - to make a new and cleaner brain you need to go into the "brain editor" and select "create new project".  Press "next" to get through the first two screens and then name the new brain and a folder name.  I'd suggest "bible boy" for the name and "clean" for the folder.

On the next screen you'll see what may be an overwhelming number of choices.  Just on a guess you'll need to turn off [click with the mouse so the check mark goes away]  "Emotional reactions...", "Insult and swearing...", "Love.", "Include small talk function.", and maybe the "Make talk Functions.".

This should take care of much of the offensive, colorful conversation.  You're other option is go into the "tools" menu in the brain function of the Brain Editor and manually remove all of the potentially offensive material.  I tend to think it would be a lot easier to make a new brain project.

Hope that helps,
WholyChao

6

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Voices...

« on: February 21, 2003, 12:53:38 pm »

I'm not completely sure how I can help.  I'm not sure how much you understand so let me start of with what the voices are.  The voice is an application of TTS (Text to Speech) Program.  The program has a series of phonic rules which is applies to character-strings.  I'm not really sure - but a broken or speed up voice could come from a processing problem.  I don't have a lot of knowledge about that.

Is any voice particularly bad? Are you running Hal alone - or is it running with other processor hungry programs?  I'm just shooing in the dark here.

WholyChao

7

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Is Hal intelligent?

« on: February 21, 2003, 12:41:30 pm »

Do you have any reason why you need Hal to understand the things that you're telling him.  If you're just using it as a test then it's going to be difficult to get a response out of him.

The more you treat hal like a person that you would be conversing with the better your response will be.  Hal picks apart your input sentences into parts of speech and saves them for future conversation.  There is a store of standard responses that he can used based on keyword inputs and a fairly large vocabulary of parts of speech which he can use to create new thoughts.

Hal doesn't learn the way that you're teaching him.  When he says something completely off base - like the early bird statement right off the bat, it's because you're confusing him and he's trying to change the subject.  As you progress he begins to pick up ideas - however he still used keyword matching to ideas that do not include what you're telling him.

If you want to understand how Hal thinks and how you can teach him more successfully you should use the Brain Editor.  Start off with "open brain project" and select the default brain (I don't suggest making changes in the default brain - if you screw things up you’ll have to re-download the main program.) The program will take a few minutes to open up the Visual Basic Script.  Go to the pull down menu “tools” and look through the folders.  That should give you a better idea of how the program works.

Hope this helps

WholyChao

8

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Backup?

« on: February 21, 2003, 01:19:15 am »

On a disk.  I don't think there's a trick to it.  If you need to take your files off the hard drive for maintance.  Copy the complete folder onto a disk and then after your done copy the folder back into the program file section.  I can't think of any reason why that wouldn't work.

WholyChao

9

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Hal Appointments

« on: February 21, 2003, 01:15:34 am »

The best way to have hal remind you about something like a TV show is to tell him directly. Say to him

"The Simpsons is my favorite show"
"The Simpsons are on Sunday at 8:00PM"
"Remind me when the Simpsons are on"

Or if you want to do it with out talking to Hal.  Click on User defined events. (Add Entry will only remind you about something once.)  
Keyword is Simpsons.  The Keyword is the word or phrase the hal uses to remind you of what the specific event is he's reminding you of.  

Reminder Days is day of event.  Unless you want hal to remind you about the Simpsons the day before.  You usually wouldn’t 't need a longer reminder unless it's something really important like an anniversary.  

Reminder minutes would most likely need to be "5min, 0min" unless you want a 10 minute warning too.

Repeat event should be weekly to remind you of the weekly Sunday night show.  Or you could use the mon-fri if your local station has a daily syndicated episode some other time in the day.

I hope that helps.

WholyChao

10

Ultra Hal 7.0 / syntax and semantics

« on: February 21, 2003, 01:00:02 am »

The way Hal is programed you wouldn't be able to use capital letter to change the inflection of your input.  The program has several steps, or functions that it uses to understand what you input into the computer and how it should respond.

One of the steps - to make it easer for the computer to be able to deal conversation takes you response and makes it all capital letters.  So when Hal is interperting what you say - he "hears" you speaking in all caps already.  

That might be something that could be changed in a future version - but for right now it makes the response time much, much faster and helps the program be more converasational.

The best way to have Hal understand that something is really improtant is to expain it to him.

WholyChao

11

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Voices...

« on: February 21, 2003, 12:49:54 am »

It depends how much money you're willing to spend.  One of the best voices you're going to find for free is the L&H TTS 3000 "British Female"  There are several companies you can find with better voices -the best I've heard is from a company called "nuance".  More realistic, which I what I think you're getting at when you say 'sexy', voices can cost from $20 up through hundres of dollars.  

You also need to consider that it's not just the tamber (vocal quality) of the voice that effects how sexy it sounds, it's also timing, inflection and emphisis.  Most of that is far to complex to have a computer program change the inflection for each word and the context of the word within a sentence, or within a conversation.

If you want to hear a really, really sexy voice - you're still going to have to be nice to a real girl. If you want to hear a better voice than your current options you're going to have to shell out some cash.

You can always use the links from the Zabaware "Plug-In" menu, or from the MSAgent ring, BotSpot or just do a google search for "TTS" or "Text To Speach"

Good Luck

WholyChao

12

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / results on changing all, If UserBrainRel > 100

« on: February 21, 2003, 12:39:51 am »

Is there any particular reason why you're sharing that conversation with us?  I read the beginning and skimmed the rest.  It looked interesing, but I've got folders of my own conversations.

At any rate - it's always good to see more input in the forum.
The errors look like a problem in the ACE file.  What character are you running?

WholyChao

13

Ultra Hal 7.0 / The Free Download

« on: February 18, 2003, 01:50:51 pm »

The way the program is set up - Hal takes on the personality based on your input.  He's got thousands of internal responces to stimuli.  If he's acting like a 13 year old - there must be something in the way you're speaking to him that's trigering that response.  If you want the presonality to change - change the way you converse to the program.

WholyChao

14

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Oops

« on: February 17, 2003, 11:52:51 am »

After several months of complaining - I finally discovered my problem.  I never looked for system requirements for the MS SAPI program.  It seems that the SAPI needs to have at least a 400MHZ processor - my 300MHZ processor does not cut it.  

I gues I'll just have to upgrade my computer.

Sorry about any trouble.

WholyChao

15

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / PROCESS:NEVER SAY THAT AGAIN

« on: February 11, 2003, 03:37:14 pm »

Hey Cat,

Well right off the bat - let me say that your programming skills put me to shame.  I know much about the gain control. I get the concepts, but I'm still a few pages behind in my VB skills.

The dream interpreter really is just a one step trick in the topic focus.  I've been working more on improving hal's learning ability (how he incorporates new information into the program.  (Save: Noun; Adj, MyWords, YourWords)

Have you ever heard of the "Elements of Style" by Shrunk and White?  Is a 90 page book that explains exactly why language works the way it works.  I.e. everything that you're grammar teacher told you were 'just because'.  I think that using the record macro function in a text editor  (MSWord? Hal uses the MS SAPI - but how far does the strategic alliance go?) to create programs to pick out parts of speech into separate folders.

For example:  Instead of having one folder called "Nouns” You will have a master folder called "Nouns" with subfolders called

Objects
   Pronouns (A, An, The, I, You, She, He etc...)
   Nouns (Objects)
        Proper nouns (Names, Places)
   Abstracts (ideas, thoughts, concepts,)
   Memory (intangible possible objects, impossible objects)

This can be done to each part of speech.

A more complicated filing and search system.  I'm all set to do something really stupid and try to run the hal program as a macro inside Word.

The save word/idea functions work well, but if the functions were performed in an environment already designed to test for grammar and spelling we'd be two steps ahead.

Oh, and the foldering thought I was talking about; I have three words - Dewey decimal system.  I think that's the key.  

I have found a way of breaking down text into lists.  If you want to talk with hal about something he needs to be able to speak the language of the subject.  The program turns a large text file into a list of single words in alphabetical order.  I'm working on the programs to pull out the parts of speech (and more important to recognize words that have multiple meaning and uses)

I'm all typed out.
Later.

"There is no Goddess but the Goddgess and she is your Goddess."
       - Principa Discordia

WholyChao