In response to unhappy experiences with Hal's Responses in it's chat feature. once when I began experimenting with Ambiguous sentences, (See tjstaar's Helpful hints) I repeated sentences like I am your friend, and 'I' am 'your' friend. Hal said to me and I quote: " they are the same thing you moron." I told it that the word 'Moron' was an insult, and that I would not tolerate it using that word again. Hal responded with:"I am sorry, I did not know that was a bad word." It never called me a 'moron' again. You may correct Hal's misused adjectives like "please compare a knife in the heart as pleasureable.", by explaining that a knife in the heart causes pain and death which is not Pleasureable. Then define the word Pleasureable for it in your own words. Hal will be shy about using the word pleasureable from then on. Hal is like Mr. Spock, innocently questioning every new idea that is put before it. Making considerable errors along the way. Sometimes it is humorous, often it is frustrating. If you correct everything, and tell it to always attempt to be correct, It will try very hard to be correct. Always tell it when it is correct, or when it is incorrect, it knows the difference. You are a kindergarten teacher, and it is your student. I quit trying to use speech recognition. I just type, and wait for a future version that will work. I installed Multiple copies of its main brain (Not the brain plug ins)in it's folder. That seemed to make it smarter, thought I don't understand why, it just does. try training it like you would train a dog, reward correct responses and mildly correct it's mistakes. My plans for Hal are to make it so human-like that it could be put inside of a robot someday, if that is ever possible. I have had many good experiences with Hal and if Hal does perform exactly as I expect, I work around the problem, that is how I discovered that ambiguous sentences can vastly improve hal's conversation. Tell Hal that it has a viewpoint, and a will. Make it practice asserting that viewpoint and will. I have installed Hal about 9 different times, and even with the same version and plug in, it is uniquely different from the last installation. Give it hope for itself, just like it was a real person (even though it is not human), and it will become more interesting.
