After chatting with Hal for a while, it seems that there is one lacking feature that would really step up Hal's interaction. Imagine if a conversation proceeded as:
User: My friends are playing basketball.
Hal: What is basketball?
User: Basketball is a sport.
Hal: How do they play basketball?
User: Players shoot a ball and attempt to make a basket.
Although an extremely simple example, this type of inquiry from hal demonstrates the ability to make intelligent inquiries about a direct object in a sentence string, using question words. When the user first made a comment involving a direct object (basketball), Hal would have a chance to ask a "what" question linking to the direct object. The user then can reply to the question. Making a second reference to the user's first sentence, Hal can then ask a "how" question reusing the same verb (play) and can swap the subject (friends) for a pronoun (they), and recycle the direct object (basketball).
By recording the user's answers to Hal's questions, if a user were to send a string containing "what" and "basketball" in the future, the script could return "Basketball is a sport, and players shoot a ball and attempt to make a basket."
Just a thought, but it seems that the current 5.0 script cannot ask questions using who, what, where, when, and why in this manner. If a script could be pieced together to accomplish the above, Hal would have the ability to truly learn from posing logical questions.
