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Sorry for the delay in response. It's been a busy week.

Wow, these are fantastic! Thank you both for the wonderful Bettie Page characters. Good work NIGE and Jackgephart. I'm going to try my hand at tinkering with making them look greyscale and/or "colorized" just for fun too.


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Interesting perspective on... well, perspective :) However, I have to disagree with your assessment, ricky.

Perspective means nothing in the world of AI. It's about thought and the thought process. Perspective is flawed.

Helen Keller had thought, but could not communicate those thoughts to the outside world. She did not know HOW to communicate until she was taught how.

Ultra Hal does not think, but it can communicate. It is the exact opposite. Communication without thought is nothing but output. Words on a screen, on a billboard, in a book. It can be well written, but it's still just words. Ultra Hal does not understand what it is saying, it does not know the meaning of a single word. However, it knows that certain words and phrases are proper when in response to other words and phrases.

Conversation does not make life or intelligence. Otherwise Teddy Ruxpin would have been one scary doll!

However, i do think while your argument is flawed, the idea behind it is true. We won't make any real progress until we gain an understanding about life. I believe when we can figure out why life does certain things, and emulate that, then we can grow closer to understanding true AI. Instincts, self preservation, abstract thought.

When an AI can give abstract thoughts, come to it's own decisions and conclusions without prodding, to know the meaning of a word and initiate conversation without being prompted, then i'll see it as more than just a program. Until then, a rose is a rose.

I guess it's just the programmer inside me talking :)

Hello!

I've looked through all of the wonderful characters that have been created on here and a lot of them are very well done. However, I've yet to find one that is what I am looking for. If someone who likes to create characters for Ultra Hal would like to give it a shot, i have a couple of requests:

First, one of Bettie Page, the classic pinup. My computer is actually named after Bettie, and having a graphical representation on the running AI would be all the better. I'd like two versions, one a standard, and another "colorized" version often seen in some of the old photographs, where she is only in black and white, but with bright red ("colorized") lipstick.

Second, i'm also looking for a "generic" computer avatar. Not the head of a human, but something that is just representative of a computer. Such as a polygon grid face, or an Asimov-style robot head. Lots of thinks could work here.

Thank you to anyone who might take up this request!

Thanks Art :)

I've been having fun tweaking Ultra Hal as well. I actually found Ultra Hal to have a little bit more personality than I expected for it's intended use!

I'm not sure I have enough information on the ins and outs of all of the workings of the AI's I am aware of to make any sort of assessment as to one AI being more capable than another, however I have found a few that I did find quite impressive.

You can chat with Jabberwacky ( http://www.jabberwacky.com ) directly online, and select discussions are posted in the archives. Quite frequently Jabberwacky often fools various users into thinking that it's really a human.

A.L.I.C.E. ( http://alicebot.blogspot.com/ ) also seems to have a unique style of learning and thought, having been developed with and uses Artificial Intelligence Markup Language. Invented by Richard S. Wallace, he's done some interesting work on studying the logic patterns and visually mapping out the "brain" of the AI. While not a perfect conversationalist, Alice has a few interesting features including the capability of being aware of the whole overall topics of conversation, rather than line-by-line.

I do know, however, that both of those AI's, as well as Ultra Hal, have all been recently nominated for the 2008 Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence.

[about]

I felt I had to chime in on this one.

A lot of people seem to be giving way too much credit to the AI capabilities of Ultra Hal, and current AI technology in general. There are two problems with hooking up a camera without any sort of recognition software to Ultra Hal and letting it "figure it out" like a child.

By hooking up a camera feed straight into Ultra Hal and letting it "figure it out", would be identical to hooking up a webcam to Microsoft Word and expecting it to descriptively type out everything it sees. You could let that setup sit for a thousand years and not a single thing would happen (beyond it crashing). Word is designed to type, but has no recognition of the input from the camera. Now, if you added some sort of recognition software that read and interpreted the visual data, you could have Word type out "Blue" when the recognition software saw and recognized something blue in front of the camera, or "Red" when it saw red. The limits of what it could see for input data would be limited by the technology of the recognition software. Without software to interpret the data coming in from the camera, it's essentially nothing but static noise.

Now while a very well done and clever piece of programming, Ultra Hal is not much more than a large script that repeats text fed into it, and learns what context that text has in relation to other words. It does not learn and comprehend on it's own.

By spending a lot of time "teaching" Ultra Hal, you can increase it's text database and improve it's context references for that text. This then gives Ultra Hal a better source information relative to your input and interests to pull from. This can allow it to put on very convincing conversations, almost mimicking real intelligence. All it is doing is parroting back what you tell it, in a convincing way. It does not think about what it is told, it does not try to process the information in different ways, it just stores it in a database table for later to parrot.

So Ultra Hal could be programmed to respond in intelligent ways to visual data it receives, but it would not KNOW what it is seeing. It's just data being processed, and has no capacity for understanding that data to learn from it, as a child would. Now, when programmers figure out a way for programs to think about data in different ways and to learn dynamically, not just process data sequentially in a database, then we'd be one step closer to self-teaching, self-aware AI.