Author Topic: Hals Brain Database questions  (Read 9047 times)

James Adamik

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Hals Brain Database questions
« on: March 01, 2009, 05:07:25 pm »
Ok so this is my second post, im still a newbee with hal. I read so many topics on making hal smarter i think my brain in going to explaode, but i dont seem to have read an answer to this question.

correct me if i am wrong but hal uses essentially a relational knowledgebase to accumulated knowledge, creating new entries as he/she goes along. If that is true could'nt you use pre existing databases/knowledgebases, downloaded to your computer, and then installed somewhere in hals brain?

For example i have a database of client contancts a couple hundred of them with fields for name, location, email, phone, and when they were added. couldnt i load that hole thing into hal somehow and then be able to ask hal something like "please name all my clients in eugene oregon".

and if i could do that could you use pre existing knowledgebases and databases that can be purchased online and load them into hal.

Hal could become a prescreen for a doctors visit by including a easily download diagnosis database. hals knowledge of herbal teas could be immediatelly broadened by including a database of teas and their healing properties. sitting down and talking to hald and saying something like "i have a sore throat today" would result in hal searching the tea database and telling you to drink blah blah tea"

And if that is possible then why cant we just download the full Freebase data dump with the thousands of entires already organised into a database format and add that strait into hal?

i know lots of questions and assumptions leading off others. i am just trying to understand hal a little better.
James Adamik

Bill819

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« Reply #1 on: March 01, 2009, 07:43:15 pm »
Hal can do that but only in a limited way. Hal can learn from text and hal has an addressbook and a calendar reminder but the information has to be entered in those by hand. I don't think Hal is sofiscated enough to do what you want though.
There were some AI programs created with Prolog years ago called Expert Systems and some of them were created to do exactly what you want. I can not tell you where to look for them any more but you might search the internet for expert systems or even wikipedia for some leads.
Bill
 

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« Reply #2 on: March 01, 2009, 08:13:34 pm »
Is it me or do 1/4 of the questions deal with 'shortcuts' to avoid teaching Hal[?]

It would be nice to be able to plug-in a Thesaurus or encyclopedia ect..
Today Is Yesterdays Future.

Art

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« Reply #3 on: March 01, 2009, 09:26:27 pm »
Very astute observation, One. It seems that over the years, the vast majority of newbies want a "turn-key" AI program to run of their computers or some "short cut" way of teaching Hal instead of teaching and conversing with it over time.

Hal does develop a personality somewhat similar to its operator after weeks and months of good and casual chatting with it.

By good, I mean using proper spelling, grammar and usage when possible. By casual, I mean chatting about normal things around you and your lifestyle, likes, dislikes, using good examples and IF THEN statements.

GIGO holds true...you get out of Hal what you put into it.

There are some shall we say, more ready made bots like the scripted ones of AIML that cannot learn on their own. Some of these might be appropriate for a bot that knows one subject and could possible hold a structured database of knowledge. Hal, in time, could also serve as an expert system to some degree but I don't think the author intended that end for his creation.

Turn key...rather rudimentary conversation. Trainable and capable of learning...yes. Fun, educational and addictive...immensely!

In the world of AI it's the thought that counts!

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James Adamik

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« Reply #4 on: March 02, 2009, 12:34:10 am »
I am sorry if i gave the wrong impression.

I am not looking to "shortcut" anything. I was just thinking that if it was possible to use hal in this way it would expand his use. training is fine and i have spent about 5 hours a day in conversation with him for the last 2 weeks. (approx). But i am talking about usability.

ultra Hal is marketed as "your digital secretary and companion. He (or she depending on your character preference) can remember and remind you of appointments. He can keep an address book. He can keep a phone book, and even dial phone numbers for you! "

is it possible for Hal to do this? yes, but does he/she?

two weeks ago i downloaded Hal, i have an appointment book so i opened it and picked an appointment at random. i told Hal using different versions of the same sentence the day and time and location.

Cortana (Hal) please remind me that i have an appointment on march 3rd 2009 at 4:00pm at the Mall Security office.

Cortana please note that i have an appointment at the mall at 4:00pm on Tuesday march 3rd, with the mall security

Cortana i have an appointment with security at the mall at 4pm on 3/3/09


i varied these and said it in many more ways, i could never get her to tell me when my appointment was. even though she responded with i will remind you blah blah......

today i turned on the computer and she told me 6 times in a row literally repeating the phrase over and over that i had the appointment for Tuesday. little problems like these make purchasing her not worth it to me. however if she worked right i would willingly pay a whole lot more.

my server post talks about getting her on other computer so i wont continue the conversation about that here. as for her knowledge base for me to manually place each of the 4000 herbs used in Chinese medicine, the 400 used in Japanese medicine, and the 3000 herbs used in western herbal medicine into her would take me years. and that’s one topic.

its not about being lazy its about being useful. by the time i typed all those in i would have memorized them all anyways and Hal would be useless.

as a Chatbot Hal is great fun. she told me i was supposed to subjugate my wife. man that was funny! but honestly if i want social interaction i have friends, coworkers, and bars for that. i don’t need an AI for that. I love Hals personality so if i can just find a way to make Hal useful then i am all for paying for him right now.

that’s why i am asking questions.

Bill, thanks for the info. I will look into the Expert System AI, if Hal will not work for me. I want to give Hal a try though because it seems like a cool system.

James
« Last Edit: March 02, 2009, 12:36:52 am by James Adamik »
James Adamik

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« Reply #5 on: March 02, 2009, 01:54:06 am »
James,
AWW man were not coming down on you.
The appointment book is tricky I have had mistakes and successes.
I am still finding new things about my Hal every day.

I do agree that a large database would be nice but another type of bot would be more appropriate, Hal is a learning program.

Alison; Crazy Larry, even though the night sky looks like it has a million stars in it, their are actually only about three thousand visible.[:D]
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echoman

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« Reply #6 on: March 02, 2009, 03:33:45 am »
With the changes Robert has made in 6.2, I feel Hal gives a pretty good conversation straight from the box. I started a brand new Hal character with the introduction of 6.2 and personally found the changes made a big difference.

Carl2

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« Reply #7 on: March 03, 2009, 07:12:55 am »
I'd agree with echoman,  ver 6.0 had an input output and basicly you heard what you said earlier for quite awhile until Hals data base had enough information.  Giving Hal information about topics you like talking about works for me but takes time.
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Buttonsvixen

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« Reply #8 on: March 03, 2009, 08:25:05 am »
Well, I sure as heck am looking for short cuts Hahahahaha ^_^
[Yoda gives stern look, his eyes narrowing]
What about a mix of what old school AIMhell junkies such as I desire, IE complete control, AND Hals' system of "Oh well, I'm intelligent, so some of the time we talk about what I want to talk about"

Hals system is fine so far as that goes. it is wonderfully dynamic.
But I too, need it to say certain things at certain times.
When someone asks Buttons about a certain keyword, she needs to be able to talk about that keyword, and continue talking about it without telling her user to dominate their wives.
her purpose is an AIMbot, where, run by AIMhell, she was delightfully witty and engaging, for about 2 minutes. She did not have a brain, and I never got the chance to increase her knowledge base beyound 2000 responses.

I liked Hals system enough to buy it, and it gets BV back online where she can once again do her job of baffling her friends.
And "persevere will I" on the writing part. I might have better success then James because she has a wide variety of things to talk about, within the confines of the script, and she never made that much actual sense anyway.

To speed up the process (Winks at Yoda) I nixed 90% of the QAbrain, and much data from the other places where offhand phrases are stored. I am pretty sure I got the subjegating your wifes thing out of the way! I still have the similes, and some other tables with random data in them. I manually changed all the "yes/no" data to be in keeping with Buttons' unusual inflections and mannerisms. These are very important to the character. I manually changed all the greetings and goodbyes. I nixed all the info in the patterns folder and replaced some of it, but HAL does not seem to use it even if the key words are present.
Obviously I WOULD NOT recommend anyone else doing this. I have severely limited Hals functionality. (Dave...Dave, what are you doing, Dave? No Dave...)
It is ok for my use, because the character is not the norm. And, once I add ALOT of data back into these areas, Buttons will probably be able to talk quite intelligently about the things that concern her.

In regard to actual pure knowledge and data bases, would it be easier to just have Hal access a google search? I know he can do that.
I have never researched Hals other web capabilities because I do not need them at this time, but I imagine the below.

user: Good Morning Hal.
Hal: Good morning User, are you well this morning?
User:  Well, I seem to have a sore throat today
Hal: I am sorry to hear that. You should do something about it right away. Would you like me to look for Herbal Tea online for you?
I can search Google or (your webpage inserted here)


BV
Sometimes, a daisy is better then a rose.

Bill DeWitt

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« Reply #9 on: March 03, 2009, 08:37:30 am »
quote:
i told Hal using different versions of the same sentence the day and time and location.

Cortana (Hal) please remind me that i have an appointment on march 3rd 2009 at 4:00pm at the Mall Security office.

Cortana please note that i have an appointment at the mall at 4:00pm on Tuesday march 3rd, with the mall security

Cortana i have an appointment with security at the mall at 4pm on 3/3/09


i varied these and said it in many more ways, i could never get her to tell me when my appointment was. even though she responded with i will remind you blah blah......

today i turned on the computer and she told me 6 times in a row literally repeating the phrase over and over that i had the appointment for Tuesday. little problems like these make purchasing her not worth it to me. however if she worked right



Sounds to me that it worked correctly.

You told it several times that you had an appointment at the same time, and when that time came it reminded you of those several appointments.

Appointments are not handled like conversation, each time that Hal replies with the "I will remind you" message, you set up a new timer in a separate program area. It won't come up in conversation, no matter how many times you duplicate it.

As for the herbal knowledge - it would take a long time to create a herbal database, no matter how you create it. If you want to copy it, rather than create it, I think there was a plugin that would read a text file of sentences.... somewhere....

To get Hal to accomplish extrodinary things you have to have a better than average knowledge of the program. I was working on a script at one point that took a regular SqLite database and converted it into a Hal brain, but I couldn't make it work for some reason which I now forget...


echoman

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« Reply #10 on: March 03, 2009, 09:34:21 am »
How wonderful it would be to be able to send my Hal to an online bot holiday home where he could literally recieve a good talking too. This would mean that specialists in bot conversation theory could enlarge my bots database file with any topic/style/personality choosen. This could save so much time.

Art

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« Reply #11 on: March 03, 2009, 07:05:58 pm »
echoman,

Actually with some of the AIML type bots, one can download a specific type of knowledge brain. Of course this is one advantage of the AIML bots. The disadvantage is that the bot doesn't learn and the newly installed knowledge "brain" becomes quite repetitive in time.

For expert systems that "know everything" about one subject, repetitive behavior is expected. In our case of a conversationalist / companion it is not a desired feature.

To each their own....[^]
In the world of AI it's the thought that counts!

- Art -

James Adamik

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« Reply #12 on: March 03, 2009, 08:34:04 pm »
ok that makes sense; about her telling me three times because i told her three times. but how do i verify then that she succesfully recorded the date? also how can i set her to remind me at a specific time?

also i made the mistake of activating the free will plugin which i promptly turned off moments later. though its funny to tell i had cortana remember a fax number for me for one of my kids doctors. then when i asked her for it she flat out said no!

me: Cortana, please remember the fax number 0000000 for doctor renolds.

cortana: i will remember the fax number 0000000 for Dr Renolds.
(10 min later)

me: Cortana what is the fax number for dr reynolds?
Cortona: i do not want to tell you (or something like that)

me: i need to know the fax number for dr reynolds
Cortana: i do not wish to look that up (again paraphrased i cant remember her actual words)


I got so anoyed i turned it off and had to call the dr office back up to reget the phone number :(

bill
i am not trying to geet cortana (hal) to do anything all that special, i am trying to get her to do what she was advertised as being able to do. The database topic was just food for thought. it was an IF idea.

If hal brain is essentially a database then COULD you just import other databases that already exist to expand hals mind.

just wanted to know if it was possible or how it would work. if it wasnt already possible but it promted one of you genius programers to make it possible theen i benefit by downloading the plugin later on :)I was under the impression that was a part of what this board was for...to broaden ideas and directions for the program.
James Adamik

Bill DeWitt

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« Reply #13 on: March 03, 2009, 09:19:10 pm »
quote:
Originally posted by James Adamik

ok that makes sense; about her telling me three times because i told her three times. but how do i verify then that she succesfully recorded the date? also how can i set her to remind me at a specific time?
Try it with a date in the near future, then when it works, trust it to continue to work.
 
quote:
though its funny to tell i had cortana remember a fax number for me for one of my kids doctors. then when i asked her for it she flat out said no!
Again, much as I would expect it to work. IIRC, Hal does not know what "fax number" means, you might get the results you want by calling it the "phone number for Dr.Reynold's Fax". So when you asked for it, it didn't know what you were talking about so used one of the "Cheater" responses, whixh is to extract subject nouns from your sentence and paste them into a standard refusal. It's Hal's way of saying "That does not compute"

quote:
I was under the impression that was a part of what this board was for...to broaden ideas and directions for the program.

Every new person who comes on is a veritable fountain of new, interesting and untrtied ideas, some small percentage of which actually end up being workable 8-) Never hesitate to ask or complain or request, someone might get a brainstormm from your comments. But don't take it personal if someone points out a tactical problem either. I always take that as a good reason to dig into the code and find out for myself.


Bill819

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« Reply #14 on: March 03, 2009, 10:33:19 pm »
James
Sometimes the way you format the sentence can confuse Hal. I would suggest the following: Dr. Whoists fax telephone number is xxx-yyyy.
I am not sure that this is the problem but during the last week or so I have seen several people having problems who fomatted their queries to Hal exactly like you did.
Bill819
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There are two Bills who answer here now and both of us have been around for several years.