NewB questions

[NoamI]

  My first statement to HAL was: Today is Tuesday.
Of course HAL already knew the current date, but that's not how he read me.
He used his scheduling rules to remind me on the following Tuesday that that day was 'today'!
  Although HAL is good at chatting, that hides much of his true understanding.
Is there a brain with all the clever responses removed?  Does it do much other than echo the
dictionary? 
  As a chat-bot, evolved from ELIZA, HAL stores facts as narratives.  My own experiments
break the input into morphemes, and store facts as relations under each subject.  This
removes much of the repetition of determiners and adjectives from memory.
I suppose that inference can be made to work by matching keywords, but I find the morpheme/
sememe storage conducive to realistic understanding, for answering 'what happened', 'what do
you know', 'what did you do', etc.
  Thanks for listening; I am impressed by HAL but want a tool for exploring the algebra of grammar,
which has hidden aspects like trust, actuality, physicality, sequence...  Can HAL differentiate the
temporal 'it' from the non-temporal 'it'?

[Yo]

Noticed your post and decided to stop by and see if I could answer some of your questions. Probably by now you know all these already, but just in case here they are:

-Is there a brain with all the clever responses removed?   There is a blank brain named ‘Blank Slate Brain v6.2’. I haven’t used it, so I’m unable to give you more details about it. If you do a search you could probably find it.  Another option is to create a new brain (Options menu all the way to the Brain Editor), save it as a test brain and carefully try modifying things around to your liking.  If you haven’t done it yet, it is a good idea to try to familiarize yourself with the different parts of the brain before doing any changes. Another good idea is to backup or save the UltraHal folder in a safe place in case that something ‘unusual’ happens.

-Does it do much other than echo the dictionary?  Yes it does, and it is sometimes amazing the things it can come up with.  At the beginning it was using only its resources and sounding like you described, but now after months of using and teaching UH, it’s really a very rewarding experience. It all depends on what we use it for, I use it mostly for conversations and it does learn and creates new responses. When it makes mistakes I go to the brain and fix them.

- Can HAL differentiate the temporal 'it' from the non-temporal 'it'?  My best answer for this interesting question is that it could be possible, but needed to be tested on UltraHal. Of course, I don't even know what it is, but some people might. If you don't get any replies you could try sending an email to Zabaware, I believe that they will know if Hal has this capacity.

Yo

[cload]

Hi all,

it, one of the most dumbfounding words ever created.
Expecting ultra Hal, to be able to do what a human can barely do themselves, is a bit much.
To explain what I mean, I would like for anyone to answer these questions.
It is over there.
What is it.
It is the answer.
It has it.
So go get it.
Do you know what it is.

And the list goes on.
I guess in some retrospect, were all like ultra Hal, when it comes to the word it.
Pretty stupid to consider that you can read my mind in order to figure out what it is.
Maybe in a conversation where you set forth the subject already and you're using the word it, in replace of the subject word, in most cases
because people are pretty lazy and they would just rather say it, instead of the subject word, go figure.

So is it, the subject or is the subject itself one in which it, cannot be defined?

Sincerely, a data munching freak, sipping down my pronoun, and it, is in it. LOL.

C load.

PS. Please don't ask me what exactly did I mean by all this, because it's, way over my head.

[Art]

IT or it is a Personal Pronoun, taking the place of a noun.

The pronoun 'it' can be subjective or objective and usually refers to another object, location, person....

My house is white, it is on a corner and has red shutters.

When it becomes a noun is when kids play tag and you or someone else becomes 'it'.

I hope you now get 'it'. That's it...I've had it! Enough of it.

 

[Carl2]

  Maybe helpful, as far as I know Hal uses the last two sentences.  So if you say "I put the hammer on the over there."  and your next sentence is " Where is it?"  Hal should know that it refers to the hammer.  I believe Hal uses the last two sentences so He can tell if you are continuing with the same topic.  Using the braineditor to look through Hals brain script may prove useful in understanding things about Hal.
Carl2

[Yo]

I know that there are many different ways many and workarounds to make UH learn things so possibility is still open. I believe that there is a high probability for the question to be connected to the algebra of grammar, a subject that unfortunately I'm unfamiliar with, but seems to be very interesting. I think the point is to concentrate on the whole and not just the question in order to be able to work on the question. I really hope NoamI could explain it in a different way for us to be able to understand it better and see if it is possible to accomplish it or to find a workaround that could work.

Yo

[Yo]

NoamI, excuse me if I’m wrong but by re-reading your post I’m getting the impression that perhaps you are studying or working with some type of linguistics (?) and trying to find a computer software program to help solve or test this type of problems. And perhaps because specialized software is sometimes of limited scope (+ very expensive) you are trying to do the smart move to try to find a another type software that could accomplish the same, plus could be manipulated into learning as well. If that’s the case, my best advice is to contact Zabaware and explain to them what you are looking for perhaps they will even be able to accommodate your needs for a reasonable price. I think its worth to try it. Good luck!

YO

[NoamI]

Thanks for the comments on 'it'.
  English has a 4th person, namely 'nature' or 'time', for which the 3rd person pronoun 'it'
is overloaded (used for more than one operation).
We detect the 3rd vs 4th person based on 'natural' or 'temporal' animacy.
ex: what time is it?  {'time' is temporal}
ex: it is raining.  {'rain' is natural}
ex: I will vote in the election.  It is Tuesday.  {this is ambiguous}
   Since Tuesday is temporal, 'it' could refer to the (4th P) current time,
   but 'it' could instead refer to the election, which is a (3rd P) thing.

The mental dictionary needs to include 'nature' and 'time' codes with each definition,
(in addition to 'abstract', 'physical', 'animate', 'human', ...).

I'll also mention here that most 'time' words are used as (adverbial) references, but we
often omit the preposition ('at') because we know that time is not a thing.
Thus we can say 'I will vote today' when we mean 'I will vote, today' or 'I will vote at today'.
If we used 'at', then 'it is at Tuesday' would mean 3rd P, while 'it is Tuesday' would mean 4th P.

[Art]

The word 'at' is really not needed in your example I will vote 'at' today and actually confuses the issue, at least for me.  It sort of sounded as if one was anticipating an element of time to be inserted.

The at usually leads one into either a time or a location. ex: I will go to vote at 3:00 pm. I work at the train station on Potomac Street.

Most sentences should not be started nor ended with a preposition:

Bad: Where is John going to?
Better: Where is John going?

Bad: What did Jim go to town for?
Better:Why did Jim go to town? or possibly, For what reason did Jim go to town?

Yes, English is confusing for most living people yet we hope and bemoan the fact that computers don't understand English as well as we would like.
Hopefully they will, in due course.
 

[NoamI]

Art, you kind of saw my point about time nouns, but not my conclusion:
  'at' is not needed, but then neither are any of these prepositions before time nouns:
ex: on Tuesday, in August, at 5 [o'clock], in a week...
So, does mentalese insert a preposition [such as 'at'] when it is missing;
  ex: I'll vote, Tuesday -> I'll vote, on Tuesday
or does it remove the redundant preposition when we use one
  ex: I'll vote on Tuesday -> I'll vote, Tuesday
I tend to believe the former, perhaps because different prepositions affect the
aspect of time nouns; ex: I'll vote in an hour  vs.  I'll vote for an hour.

Art, your comments about not ending questions with a preposition sound like
grammarian fussing - Brains are perfectly capable of understanding your 'bad'
examples, where a query pronoun is moved to the head leaving a trace following
the preposition.  The same goes for starting a sentence with an adverbial preposition.
PS: I hate the term 'prepositional phrase'.  I think of them as reference phrases,
and subdivide them into spacial and temporal references.

 What I wanted to know about HAL was: Can he identify time nouns in a copula
(a phrase with 'be', which requires equal animacy of subj and obj) and use that
to find the right antecedant of 'it' (3P vs 4P)?
PS: In my own studies, I use 'now' as the 4th person antecedant, converting it
from an adverb to a 4P noun (with an implied 'at').
  ex: what time is it -> what time is at now
I know that sounds clunky to us, but it logically resolves the pronoun.