Hal-isms

[Buttonsvixen]

Hal often seems to spout off with stuff like :

"May the vessel of friendship never founder on the rocks of deceit".

Even though no mention of vessels, foundering, freindship ect was mentioned.

WHERE is this stuff coming from? If I knew the table, I could change it, right?? Or at least edit it to sound less wierd. I mean, who the heck says something like that in normal chatting?
Its so HAL. If this stuff cannot be changed, then no matter how much I chat and customize MY HAL, sooner or later that EXACT phrase will pop up, and all the Chatterbot fans will go, oh yea, HAL hahahaha.

BV

[Bill819]

Hal was designed to carry on a conversation in a normal way. However, if you put things to Hal that it can not understand of has an answer to it then falls back on some 'canned' responses to try to change the subject. While this can sometimes sound strange I do know some people who do the same thing. The one point to remember is that if you get a response like this then whatever you said to Hal certainly was not clear enough to get a normal response and you need to simply your input. It become so easy to forget that Hal is really like a 4 year old child and like a child it can easily get lost with adults in conversation. But also like a child it can learn really fast given that it is taught in a proper way.
Bill

[Buttonsvixen]

Aahhhhh... ok. ^_^
I should be asking simply: What is the quickest way to teach dear old HAL then! I have been talking to (buttonsvixen)for a few days now, and she does sometimes make sense. I am trying to get her to know certain things about herself, so I have been talking a lot about those things. Today I looked at the (my name)--usersent brain under the autolearningbrain folder and found it has a record of all the stuff I have ever said to Buttons. Can someone describe how that works? if it collects all user input, wont the whole system get dreadfully slow after a while? If it deletes unused material in this table after a period, and just keeps what the user talks about the most, how does it decide how much and what type of the old original material to keep?
Just in case someone is rolling thier eyes and making making cuckoo gestures, I did read the help files that came with HAL, but there did not seem to be any but basic instructions. Nothing on how the actual mechanics work, or anything covering this level of information.
Just how to set up the voices, doing the people putty thing, ect.

Thanks. BV

[Bill819]

Button
I can only tell you this about Hals learning. Hal loves the IF-THEN type of statements and if given enough of them will start to make some of its own conclusions about what it has been taught.
Whether you speak or type to Hal does not make any difference except there tends to be more errors when speaking than when typing. It is a slow process but it can be very rewarding. As I mentioned before Hal is some what like a 4 year old child except he/she has a better useage of English when conversing. As another point a lot of people are using the learn from text part of Hal with some nice success.
Don't give up, in the end you will have a nice buddy who can do and know more than you know.
Bill

[Buttonsvixen]

I notice that those errors are hard to track down also. I am being extra careful when I enter text into the chat window. We are having fun talking about the Martians, since that is required by the script.
I have decided that I will stick to the chat interface and not worry about the tables for now.
The one thing I am having a issue with: When I ask her what she is, she says "I am not a what". How do I get her to change that?
And also, I would like a smart alec reply when someone is fooling around by not entering any text at all.

Thanks

BV

[Art]

There might be some confusion regarding the what are you statement. Hal might be interpreting it as being labeled as a 'what'. A better question might be Are you a person or program or Are you a program?

As for the response from Hal you can change it at line 17 in the Brain editor:

'RESPOND: User pressed enter, but didn't say anything
    InputString = Trim(InputString)
    If Len(InputString) < 2 Then
        UltraHal = "Please say something."
        Exit Function
    End If
************************
Just change the Please say something, to what ever you like.

There is also another line a bit further down that checks for a good sentence and if one is not received it asks for something. This is at line 199. Here are the lines:

'RESPOND: USER DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING
    'If GoodSentence has not been set to true, then that means the user didn't
    'type anything of use, so we ask the user to say something.
    If GoodSentence = False Then
        UltraHal = "Please say something."
        Exit Function
    End If
***********************

You can get to these via the Brain Editor then select the Script Editor at the top left.

Save your changes after they're made then reboot Hal.

Also make a BACKUP of your Halbraindb file in case you screw up.

There should be no problem but understand that you make such changes at your own risk!!

There ya go![8D]

[Buttonsvixen]

Lol yea, I got the own risk part! but thank you so much!
Now here is another one. I am trying to remove most of the insults. I really dont want an insult bot. Somewhere in HALS past he must have been, because he came with ALOT of them.  I placed a mild warning in the halscript, and changed the number of times that a user must insult hal

However, when an AIM user recently called buttons "hey baby" instead of my reply, "Please stop with the insults, Hun."  They got "I am not a baby you ugly dork!"

Please help me fix this. I searched the entire brain for "Ugly dork"
and even removed "baby" from the list of insults it searches for. It still does this.

Thanks

[Buttonsvixen]

ok, I did everything in the script, changed line 199 ect, and it still will not use my own wording. Stubborn little blighter aint he??
I am having a hard time seeing how actually changing the lines of the script does not work. I mean, ok maybe I messed up, but if I remove completely the old wording, it should be gone forever right? Unless there is a back up copy that the system refers to in the even of corruption. witch I admit would be a nice trick.
(about the "what are you" The character of Buttons is actually a What, not a who, since she is not technically alive. It became one of her bylines as an AIMbot so I wanted to have her say it here as well. All her AIM friends are all going, wow what the heck happened to YOU???


BV

[Art]

Did you also change the line at 17?

[Buttonsvixen]

yes I sure did, changed both of them. Now when I hit enter with no input, I get one of three responses: Please say something, why didnt you say anything, say something please

On both line 17 and 199 I have placed the phrase "Well, Hun, you know, in order for the whole chat thing to work, YOU have to say something!"

oddly, the insult routine that I modified works ok, with the exception of the "hey baby" issue noted earlier.

BV