Topics

1

General Discussion / New Robotics site

« on: January 18, 2007, 02:25:48 pm »

Hi all

As many of you know, we have a Virtual Humans Forum www.vhumansforum.com, where several discussions and ideas are going on, and some of them include Hal 6.0.

We have now opened up also a new robotics site, which I hope can be interesting for some members here.

You can reach it at www.RobotInfo.Net

2

General Discussion / New Virtual Humans sites

« on: October 15, 2006, 10:10:35 am »

Hi all

As many of you know, we have a Virtual Humans Forum http://www.vhumansforum.com, where several discussions and ideas are going on, and some of them include Hal 6.0.

I'd like you to know that we have recently opened up three new related  sites. You can access them from the new links in the Virtual Humans Forum Home Page, or just click on the links below.

They are free pages, which do not require any registration. I hope some of you may find them interesting.


Virtual Humans Store

This is an e-commerce store, where you can search for A.I. books, robots, software and even buy them directly through Amazon.

Virtual Humans Directory

Our experience at Virtual Humans Forum and AIML Forum showed us that there are many people who want to learn and experiment, and who would like to develop their innovative ideas, but they often ask for guidelines about the best path to reach their goals.
Considering these needs, we had the idea to create a central repository of selected references, which is called Virtual Humans Directory.


Virtual Humans News

These news are based on RSS feeds provided by Yahoo! News. You can search them according to 19 different categories and/or adding keywords. You get a list of titles, and you can click on them to access the full article.

3

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Where is Seattle, Who was Galileo ?

« on: May 18, 2006, 06:12:11 pm »

Another little bug in Hal 6, version 6.0.103.

Ask Hal: Who was Galileo? (or any other famous person)
Where is Seattle? (or any other city)

Hal will give a generic answer.

The first release of Hal6 had the same problem, which I pointed out to Robert (see http://www.zabaware.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2624 )

Then Rob fixed it in the final Hal 6 version. Now he maybe forgot to set up the same fix in this new version.

However, anybody can easily fix it. Go to the brain editor (after backing it up) and around line 700 add the following lines:









This is the result after this little brain surgery:

Vit: where is seattle
Pat: Seattle: a major port of entry and the largest city in Washington; located in west central Washington on the protected waters of Puget Sound with the snow-capped peaks of the Cascade Mountains and Mount Ranier visible to the south and east; an aerospace and computer center; site of the University of Washington.

Vit: who is galileo
Pat: Who is galileo? I'm thinking that it must have a good frame work. Galileo: Italian astronomer and mathematician who was the first to use a telescope to study the stars; demonstrated that different weights descend at the same rate; perfected the refracting telescope that enabled him to make many discoveries (1564-1642). Galileo Galilei.

Anyway, I hope Robert fix this (together with the other bug I described in http://www.zabaware.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3264 ), in the next upgrade.

4

Ultra Hal 7.0 / A little problem with quotes

« on: May 12, 2006, 05:22:35 pm »

I've found a little problem with Hal 6.0.103. Maybe this already happened with previous versions and I never noticed, or maybe it's related to some change in my PC setup, since nobody else reported it.

However, here is the problem.

If Hal says something containing a <quote> command, she does not translate it correctly. It's easy to get this kind of answer. Just keep on repeating several times BYE, until Hal gets angry and says this:



I've looked in the code in debug and found this solution: just move the lines 250 and 251 after line 258:



After this change I get the correct answer:



I hope this can be helpful to other.

5

General Discussion / AIML chatbot

« on: February 15, 2006, 06:18:44 pm »

This might be a bit off-topic, since it's about an AIML chatbot.

However, I'd like you to know that I've published an AIML chatbot, using the Pandorabot service and an Haptek character.

My goal is to translate in this Web environment (based on AIML/HTML/Javascript) the same features I gave Hal (VBScript/SQLite/Windows environment), by my plugins, trying to merge the best of the two worlds.

If someone is interested, can find it at http://demo.vhost.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk?botid=a93dcf79ae353e49

6

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Hal gets RSS Feeds

« on: January 28, 2006, 02:43:25 pm »

Hi all

I have written a new plugin for Hal6 which allows you to ask Hal the latest news about something. Hal then calls a Web page where the RSS feeds by Yahoo are read, filtered according to your search words, and displayed to you.

Please read the user guide to get more details about how to use it.

http://www.vrconsulting.it/halhelp/vrRSSHelp.html


If you are interested, you can download it accessing the Software Downloads Area in the Virtual Humans Forum:
http://www.vrconsulting.it/vhf

7

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Hal plays MP3 music

« on: January 15, 2006, 03:32:52 pm »

Hi all

I have written a new plugin for Hal6 which allows you to ask Hal to play any of the MP3 files stored on your hard disk.

Please read the user guide to get more details about how to use it.

http://www.vrconsulting.it/halhelp/vrMP3Help.html

If you are interested, you can download them accessing the Software Downloads Area in the Virtual Humans Forum: http://www.vrconsulting.it/vhf

Note: Currently I store the name of the song as the name of the file without the MP3 suffix. I know that the MP3 format allows to extract many more info, like the author, the exact title, the genre, etc. Someone more experienced in the ID3 format may further develop this aspect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3

Some consideration about it:

After indexing your MP3 files on disk, You can ask Hal to play your songs, simply saying PLAY A SONG, followed by some word which is contained in the name of the file.

But I've also managed to put some more human-like behaviour: sometimes Hal will come up playing a song even if you didn't ask!

You may be talking about California, for example, and Hal, instead of answering as usual, will say "You talked about California and this reminds me this song.", and then starts playing the song Hotel California, by The Eagles (or whatever song you have indexed, containing this word.
I have used the HalBrain.QABrain method, which is not a deterministic full-text algorythm, but can find anything which has some similarity with your words.

Since this behaviour may be annoying, I've added a parameter in the plugin window which allows you to set the level from high to none.

Some more technical note:

In this plugin I have used some tecniques which may be useful for others here:
1. Use the FSO (File System Object) classes to access operating system info (to read folders, subfolders and files).
2. Incapsulate the subfolder access in a Function, which produces a more readable and maintainable code
3. The function is recursive, which was needed to be able to read subfolders at any level.
4. I use input windows, external to the standard Hal user interface, which allow a more detailed input of specific fields, such as the directory path.

8

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Little bug in Hal 6

« on: December 21, 2005, 05:21:21 pm »

I have found a little bug in Hal6.

If you say "I will do it in 3 days", it works correctly, but if you say something like "I will do this in a few days" (words instead of numbers between "in" and "days") you get the following error:



The problem may arise also with "weeks" and "months".

The error is in the Appointment plugin, and can be easily fixed, even without knowing anything about programming.

Open the file Appointments.uhp, using any Editor, like Notepad.

Go to the line 70 and replace:
   If DateText <> "" Then
With:
   If DateText <> "" and IsNumeric(DateText) <> 0  Then

Save and reload the plugin.

PS: Merry Christmas !

[Important notice]

9

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / New Plugins for Hal6 !

« on: December 12, 2005, 02:16:12 pm »

Hi all,

I have written some plugins that I use with my Hal 6. Now I have "packaged" them so that everybody using Hal 6 can download and use them.

Hal 6 has been released a few weeks ago, so these are only the first versions of something I hope to expand in the future.

All these plugins are based on the assumption that the average user is not a programmer and should avoid to write code in plugins or, even worse, directly in the main brain. So all the data is stored in tables, which are created automatically by each plugin.

I describe them here briefly:


1. vrWeb. Extends the standard Google plugin, adding several other functions (viki, Yahoo, etc.). You can find more information looking at the user guide
http://www.vrconsulting.it/halhelp/vrWebHelp.html


2. vrFreeWill. It gives Hal the option to choose between 2 options and stores the information in a table, so that any other question about the same topic will be consistent. (It's not real Free Will, bu it's the beginning of such an idea).
You can find more information looking at the user guide
http://www.vrconsulting.it/halhelp/vrFreeWillHelp.html

Important notice:

Starting from the release Hal 6.0.103 (May 2006), Zabaware included directly the vrFreeWill plugin in the standard Hal installation. So, if you are using this release (or a higher one) you do not need to download and install it, but only to activate it.

3. vrHaptek. Manages some simple behaviours of Haptek characters.
You can find more information looking at the user guide
http://www.vrconsulting.it/halhelp/vrHaptekHelp.html


If you are interested, you can download them accessing the Hal 6 Area in the Virtual Humans Forum:
http://www.vrconsulting.it/vhf/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=39

I know that my works are much simpler than the projects currently developed by GrantNZ and Hologenicman, but I hope they can be useful to someone here, and I believe they can also define a standard in the way plugins should be organized and documented.

I will appreciate your comments.

Thanks

PS: To Rob Med: Could you please insert a link on the Zabaware plugin page, so that this software can be used also by those Hal users who do not access the forum? I would also like to highlight that these are the first third-party formally released plugins for Hal 6, as far as I know.