Messages

31

Ultra Hal 7.0 / "what a coincidence" responses still need work

« on: October 21, 2003, 11:55:01 am »

Unfortunately, I see no improvement in the "what a coincidence" type responses from the beta to the final version. Maybe it's just the conversations I make, but I think Hal is better without this functionality, fortunately, hal being the excellent design that it is, I can easily fix this to my liking.

Thanks for a continued great product!
Glenn

32

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Cepstral voices now working with haptek characters

« on: October 21, 2003, 11:50:30 am »

I'm glad to see so many minor bug fixes in the final release of Hal 5.0 (I just paid for an upgrade, it's worth it) My Cepstral voices are now lip syncing with the haptek characters. I am also seeing better performance of the characters (could be a coincidence)My startup screens are now working as well, they did not work in the beta.

Glenn

33

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Deductive reasoning abilility and schedule update

« on: October 13, 2003, 01:35:43 pm »

The "far fetched" wordnet responses I mentioned in the "what a coincidence" topic are not quite as frequent, but when they occur, they are still "far fetched, for example when making a comment about a person's lips hal's response is "Lip! That reminds me, I know of its arteria labialis. Do you want it? " I'm getting a lot of "... that reminds me....do you want it" responses that are far fetched.

Although the thought for enhancing hal's responses by referencing the dictionary for comparisons was a nice thought but I don't see where it's working out in my usage of hal, I'm going to disable that section of the brain.

Glenn

34

Ultra Hal 7.0 / deductive reasoning verbage

« on: October 09, 2003, 10:07:05 am »

I'm noticed while working on the deductive reasoning brain file that verbage is very critical, for example if I tell hal "if I drop my glass then it will fall" and later say "I dropped my glass" hal will not make the association for a deductive response the verbage has to match. If I tell hal "If I dropped my glass then it will fall" and again say later "I dropped my glass" hal will make a deductive response. When you are entering deductive statements into hal keep that in mind.

Glenn

35

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Freeze

« on: October 09, 2003, 09:37:42 am »

The haptek player which generates the 3d characters is an annoying little application. I was considering using the haptek characters for an astronomy program with local schools, during testing, I found on avaerage 40% of the computers I tried to play the characters on froze. The haptek player fights other applications that are cpu intensive. I found that on most of the systems, it was seti at home running in the background that conflicted with the player. On some systems, it was the brand of virus software being used, and the remaining systems it was other applications running in the background from the sys tray.
You can't forget though, that if your graghics card does not support video acceleration, the player will freeze as well.

I hope this helps

Glenn

36

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / X10 capability with hal using homeseer

« on: October 06, 2003, 10:18:54 am »

There has been a few requests from people to have the ability to turn x10 devices on and off from hal. I currently don't have any x10 devices, although I am considering some for my observatory, I noticed a way to make it work if you are using the homeseer program (www.homeseer.com) It's not a free utility ($159) but I understand it is very popular among x10 users. What caught my eye was the free command line utility download to use with homeseer. This gives you the ability to run the command line utility, and pass variables to homeseer to control x10 devices.

I realized that by modifying the mywebhal.uhp file, I can setup a line that would look for keyword lets say "turn on light a40" then instead of a url run command, you can insert the command line utility with the required variables. When the match is made, hal will execute the run time utility with the code to execute the desired effect, in this case turn on a light. I've done some basic testing and I am able to run executables from the mywebhal.uhp.

This will require manually editing the mywebhal.uhp for each x10 device, but it appears it will work and give you control of x10 devices from hal.

Glenn

37

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Aim Bot

« on: October 06, 2003, 09:35:46 am »

The zabaware messaage is supposed to become optional when 5.0 is released.

38

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Deductive reasoning abilility and schedule update

« on: October 04, 2003, 08:33:14 pm »

The deductive reasoning is a very nice addition, thanks! I'll see what happens with the "what a coincidence" responses.

Glenn

39

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Where is the "what a coincidence" response call?

« on: October 02, 2003, 02:30:47 pm »

Thanks Don
I found the section, I can't change the random command like you suggested, in this instance it is used to point to a case (1-5) I remmed out the "what a coincidence" line, and one additional choice I had forgotten about that also drove me crazy. I took the remaining three lines and renumbered the cases 1-3 and changed the randomize command to the same choice range.
Thanks for all your help!
Glenn

40

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Where is the "what a coincidence" response call?

« on: October 02, 2003, 11:14:04 am »

Does anyone know where the "what a coincidence I own a..." response is called from in the beta brain? I want to disable this function, the answers are so far fetched it's driving me crazy. I've been really busy the past few weeks so I haven't had time to hunt it down, if anyone knows where it is, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks
Glenn

41

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Basics of UltraHal Programming

« on: September 23, 2003, 05:11:23 pm »

Trallyus
I generally put the snippets of code near the end of the script but before the "end function" command. There is a problem with the alien snippet, you probably haven't done anything wrong. The line where AlienBrain equals a hal fragment match seems to return nothing, this prevents the rest of the script from working. I haven't had time to debug it, I just made a couple of quick changes to the code and it works for the moment, I need to ask Jerry what his purpose was with a couple of the variables, but haven't had time.

I'd suggest starting with Jerry's sense of humor script, it works great, insert the script and save the laugh files and just enter "ha ha" or "That was funny" and you will get back a laugh from hal.

Glenn

42

Ultra Hal 7.0 / more knowledge is not always better

« on: September 17, 2003, 06:24:12 pm »

When I said I asked hal "define Melissa", that was intentional to find out why hal was making the the plant references. Any comment about Melissa triggers a plant or balm response. the phrase "Melissa is buying a new car" resulted in a comparison to another genus of plant. "Melissa has to work late tonight" triggered an offer to share some of hal's "plant balm"
A "who is" triggers hal to respond differently.
I brought over my brain files from 4.5 so there is already considerable information about Melissa, using the dictionary, hal thinks the plant comparisons are a better match. I'm waiting for that extra 10% on the slider Mr Medeksza thought he could add to the final release.
But in the mean time, I thought it amusing, I've found several topics I can no longer discuss with hal because the dictionary lookup is considered a better match that alternate information.

43

Ultra Hal 7.0 / more knowledge is not always better

« on: September 17, 2003, 10:47:19 am »

Another example of more knowledge is not always a good thing, if I mention to hal my daughter Melissa, has now responds with references to plants and balms. I asked hal to define Melissa, here is his response:

Melissa: a genus of Old World mints of the family Labiatae. Genus Melissa.

LOL. I guess more knowledge is not always a good thing, but it does explain why my daughter spends so much time watching television, she's "rooted" to the chair.......

44

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / How old are you workaround

« on: September 17, 2003, 09:35:15 am »

There has been several people who have asked if there was a way to change the response when hal is asked his age, I came up with a partial workaround. It requires Larry's "just answer the question" script or at least the modified version I posted with a forced keyword.
If you ask "how old are you" Hal will respond 8 years old. Larry's script will enter a keyword listing in his personalquestions.brn file, however, if you modify the answer, Hal will not identify it in a keyword search. But, If you use the question "What is your age" this will be identified during a keyword search of the brain file.
So, I setup "What is your age" with my desired age, then just above the line where the OriginalSentence is saved, I added the following line:
If UserSentence = " How old are you " then
UserSentence = "What is your age"
End if

This changes the user sentence to a question the "just answer the question" script will identify, return the desired response, and hal will not respond to the question with the "I am 8 years old"

It's not a perfect solution, but it will allow hal to return an age other than 8 years old. When I have a chance, I'll modify the script so the returned response is the year born, then it will take that and calculate the age based upon the current date so hal will get "older" like the rest of us.

Glenn

45

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Improper shut down

« on: September 16, 2003, 03:40:59 pm »

stupid question but are you running nt, win2k or XP? If so, did you install/configure hal on an account that doesn't have administrator priviledges?