Topics

1

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Hal's Topics

« on: February 22, 2004, 09:17:18 pm »

How does Hal store new topics it learns, and where?  If I wanted to view these, how would I do so?

I pulled up the Brain Editor just now and looked at Topic Focus... I see lot of Topics there but none that I'm sure I've taught Hal.  I've been telling it a lot about Ireland, Poetry, and Philosophy today, but I dont see these topics listed.  I assume they are recorded somewhere and I'm just not looking in the right place.  Can someone point me in the right direction.

Oh, and I notice at the bottom of the Topic Focus window it has an option to add new topics.  What would happen if I added some?  Would this help Hal to focus more on the new topics I'm trying to teach it?

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Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Word Discrimination

« on: February 22, 2004, 08:36:45 pm »

Okay, I'm very carefully skirting the edges of tinkering with Hal's brain.  Mostly I'm just learning how it works right now, what it can and can't do.

Here's my question, how good is Hal at discriminating between similar words, context of use, and does it recognize a hyphenated word as being a different word than one of the root words?  In the later case, if it cannot recognize the difference, how does it handle the hyphenated word (two words combined by a hyphen) for things like topic recognition?

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Ultra Hal 7.0 / Possible conflict

« on: February 22, 2004, 06:28:51 pm »

Okay, I've been having an unusual problem.  I've written Don about this but we couldn't figure it out so I thought I'd stop pestering him and throw it out to the forum.

I'm running the free version of Hal which I just installed.  I'm also using CyberBuddy, and am often running them at the same time.  My OS is Windows 2000 Pro with all current service packs and relevant updates.

The first problem I noticed is that often when I exist Hal it closes the program but the HalAsst.exe continues to run and can be seen in the Task Manager Processes listing.  This meant I would have to close it manually in task manager before I could run the program again.  Don suggested I try running Repair, which I did, but it didn't help.

I think I may have discovered the potential problem.  I tried running Hal without CyberBuddy being active... it closes fine and the HalAsst.exe doesn't remain resident.  So I have concluded that perhaps on my NT based platform somehow CyberBuddy is keeping Hal active, but I don't know why it would do that... maybe a conflict from using the same character?

Second, and I don't know if this is related... Hal sometimes losses its mind... literally.  It stops responding to me and when I check under General Options / Brain... none are listed.  Its like its forgotten where they are.  Now while a bot losing its mine might be great comedy material... its annoying when trying to use it.  I'll try to debug this some more but any comments or help would be appreciated.

I seem to be having a lot of problems with Hal.  Don suggested it might be low system resources.  So I setup a system monitor to check up on this.  Despite the fact I am on an older P3 machine, my resources seem fine... Hal will sometime cause a spike when it does a new task, but most of the time (even during chat) CPU usage hovers at 3-4% and I have plenty of available memory.  So I don't think its system resources, but I could be wrong.  If anyone can suggest anything else I might check (and how to do so) I'm all ears.

Hal is a neat little program that I think could grow into something really terrific.  I've already sent a lot of suggestion to Don (he may be cross-eyed after reading the list [] ) and am looking forward to seeing how the software develops.  So I really want to get these issues solved so I can enjoy the program.

Thanks,
Sean

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Ultra Hal 7.0 / Opening the wrong thing

« on: February 22, 2004, 02:09:05 pm »

Hi,

I'm new to all this but learning quickly.  I just encountered an odd problem with Hal.  I asked Hal to open Word and it correctly opened MS Word... however, it opened a document with it that I did not ask for.  In its own text box it said it is now running "document name" (Word).  At first I thought it was misunderstanding and trying to open the document by mistake.  So, I tried asking it to open another document by name... and it would not do so.  Anyone have any ideas what is going on here?

Sean