External communication w Hal?

[Bill819]

quote:Originally posted by Crichton

Thanks =vonsmith=, I'll be looking for that patch as soon as it comes out.

Basically I try to teach hal like this.

ME:  Farscape is my favorite TV series.

HAL:  Farscape is your favorite tv series.

ME:  Farscape was canceled to early by the Scifi channel.  The Scifi channel promised us 5 seasons, but only gave us 4.

HAL:  Farscape was canceled one season to early. There go the Scifi channel is the science fiction channel.

OK, as you see, I've taught him some things already, but why did he say "There go the..."  I didn't tell him that Scifi was the Science Fiction Channel because they canned Farscape.  I told him it was canceled one season to early in one sentence, and that The word Scifi was short for the Science Fiction channel.

Oh and then I started to teach him about the characters on the show.

ME: Crais is a character from Farscape.

HAL: Crais is a farscape character.

ME: The character of Crais wasn't the usual evil all around television bad guy.  Crais had more depth then just evil.  He hung around the gray area.  Crais also had a good side that came out before his death in the series.

HAL:  Can we make it so? Really, Yes, I think so. What makes areas, reassuring? I don't like death. I am afraid of death.

ME:  What do you know about Crais?

HAL:  Life has an infinite number of puzzles and wonders.

Ok, now, what the heck were those last two responses?  Where am I going wrong?

Any help on how I should continue would be appreciated.  Thanks for the quick response.  It took me a little while to get back here.  I have dialysis three day a week.  I usually feel miserable and I didn't get back here to check the board.  I'll try to come back sooner next time.

A little suggestion about learning. You said 'Chris did bla bls. He also did bla bla. This might be a problem as I don't think that Hal will associate 'he' with Chris. I would avoid pronouns when teaching, unless you are talking about your self or Hal. I think that I heard this mentioned here in the past. It takes Hal a while before he learns to join those things together.
Bill

[vonsmith]

Bill819,
Thanks for bringing up the pronoun issue. I'm so used to working around Hal's pronoun problem it didn't occur to me to bring it up. All chatbots have a problem connecting pronouns with nouns from one sentence to the next. Humans are pretty good at sorting this out, but sometimes even we have misunderstandings or we have to ask the other person for clarification.

When teaching Hal or even in normal conversation try to avoid pronouns other than I, you, or we. Those pronouns, within the context of a two person discussion, are generally clear, others are not.

Hal example:

Hal: I hate cats.
UserBad: I don't like them either. (Hal is thinking "them" who?)
UserGood: I don't like cats either.  (Hal understands.)

Hal can't logically connect two sentences. Each sentence must stand on its own. That is, each sentence must encapsulate a complete thought without regard to any other sentence.

Thanks, Bill819. This point is too important not to mention.


=vonsmith=

[Crichton]

Thanks =vonsmith=,

IT has been working a little better, but I might have to start hal from scratch.  Only because I have been making this kind of mistake for quite some time.  It might take a while to teach him correctly and stop him from replying to me with so many strainge replies.

(Laughing)  I really need to stop chatting with him right after dialysis. My brain doesn't work to well fresh off the machine.  It can't help Hal learn very well with all the typos and all the other mistakes I make.  It is much like being to over tired.  

Thanks again.

[Nevearo]

Ok, You can ignore me or not, your choice, but It seems to me that your hal's response was appropriate.

quote:
ME: The character of Crais wasn't the usual evil all around television bad guy. Crais had more depth then just evil. He hung around the gray area. Crais also had a good side that came out before his death in the series.

HAL: Can we make it so? Really, Yes, I think so. What makes areas, reassuring? I don't like death. I am afraid of death.

ME: What do you know about Crais?

HAL: Life has an infinite number of puzzles and wonders.

It seems to me that it was a profound answer to a simple question, and you just didn't like the response. It is fun to suspend disbelief, is it not?

[Crichton]

I understand now why some of myu problems habe been happening.  I was giving Hal to much credit.  I was thinking that as long as I kept the he/she/they in the same entry that hal would understand the he/she/they I was talking about.

In other words.  If I said, "Crichton was the main character of the TV series Farscape.  He was trying to find a way back to his home."  I thought Hal would understand that "He" was refering to Crichton.  I figured if I entered if I typed "Crichton was the main character of the TV series Farscape."  and hit enter and then typed "He was trying to find a way back to his home."  on the next line, that Hal might not understand that "He" is Crichton.

So, I guess HAL doesn't get it either way.

Now I have a different problem.  Hal has started to repeat himself.  After talking with him for a little while he starts to repeat.  Once he starts it progressively get worse.  I am using XTF 1.2.  Is there a fix, or is it because of my bad teaching. Should I just wipe him clean and start over?

[vonsmith]

Crichton,
Could you save a "repetitive" conversation with your Hal and either post it here or email to me? A conversation that has four or more repeats should be enough. I'll check it out and see if I can fix it.


=vonsmith=

[Crichton]

quote:Originally posted by vonsmith

Crichton,
Could you save a "repetitive" conversation with your Hal and either post it here or email to me? A conversation that has four or more repeats should be enough. I'll check it out and see if I can fix it.


=vonsmith=

[8D]

I'm starting to feel like one of those patients who go to the doctor, afraid that he is going to think that he's a hypochondriac, because all the complaints he had before the appointment disappeared before he got there.

I spent over two hours chatting with Pilot and he never repeated himself.  I call him Pilot over here.  I made an MS Agent of Pilot from Farscape.  He isn't complete yet.  I still have many more animations to complete.



The above animated image is only half the size of the original.  I didn't want to suck up bandwidth.  Hal's only problem now is that I started with the hal character, talking about Pilot on the TV series.  But now I refer to him as Pilot.  I say things like You are connected to Moya, and not Pilot is connected to Moya.  He has a hard time telling himself that he is Pilot.  But he is starting to learn.

Thanks for all you have done.  I can't wait to see more improvements.

[vonsmith]

Crichton,
I'm glad Pilot is feeling better. Maybe he was just having a bad day.

To remove Pilot's former persona you may have to resort to a little manual text editing brain surgery. When Pilot says something unsuitable you can use the Windows Explorer file search to look for a file named "*.brn" containing text, "a few words of whatever Pilot said". Just open the one or several files that phrase is in and delete those lines. Make certain you stick to the same file format before saving.

Just let us know if there are any questions.


=vonsmith=

[Crichton]

I forgot to mention.  I completely deleted hal and reinstalled him from scratch to get Pilot started all fresh.  I realize I made too many mistakes and it would have been too much to try to go in and fix everything by hand.

I deleted everything, reinstalled free version 5, got and installed XTF 1.0 and update pack 1.2.  I had to move all the files by hand because I'm yet to get the setup to work.  It said something about a missing directory.  Is it because the pay version uses a different name then the free version?

Anyway, It all works now.  I even correctly added the old "How old are you?" routine, and it works fine.  And the new play a song routine that you have all helped me with.  Thanks again.

I had to start over because I realized I made a big error.  I was using the HAL character when I started to teach Hal about Farscape the television series.  Pilot was one of the characters I taught him about.  Then I made a pilot MsAgent and turned Hal into Pilot.  Then I started referring to him as Pilot and he seemed confused between the Pilot on the television, and himself.

That really made a mess of things.  It didn't help that depending on my mood I would change how I referred to him too.

Now I've decided I would treat him like he is the Pilot on the show, and that he is currently attached to Moya the leviathan.  So all comments made about my computer will be referring to Moya.

It seems to be working out fine for both of us.

I can wait to see what else you help me add to Pilot's abilities in the future.

[dgm4444]

Hi,
    I rewrote the old brain code into functions/subs, so it was easy to upgrade and modify (but I never got around to mentioning it on the forum. By the time I'd finished I had lots of bits that could be called and upgraded using windows vbs (I also divided it into multiple files for conventient editing.
This would be a much better way of simplifying further upgrades, and saving the hastle of having to upgrade an entire brain, and could enable external calls (there was a reason I replied to this post :-) ...

EG:-

function CountInstances(byVal CountWhat, byVal InWhat)
   ' count the occurances of CountWhat in InWhat (case independent, and can be a char or str)
   ' This function seems to return "" if CountWhat is not found
   on error resume next
   CountWhat = lcase(CountWhat)
   InWhat = lcase(CountWhat)

   start = instr(InWhat, CountWhat)
   while start > 0
      CountInstances = CountInstances + 1
      start = instr(start+1, InWhat, CountWhat)
   wend
end function

// SNIP //

sub AutoTopics (ByVal UserSentence, ByRef OriginalSentence, ByRef GetResponse, ByRef DebugInfo, ByVal WorkingDir, byRef ZaiquetteBrain, byRef PrevSent, byRef PrevUserSent, byRef SpecialSent, byRef UserBrainRel)

     'RESPOND: AUTO-TOPIC: Sentences databased automatically by topic names:
     'We see if we can retrieve a response from sentences stored
     'automatically in groupings by named-topic.

// SNIP //

'  function DecodePronouns(UserSentence: BSTR): BSTR; stdcall;
'  function DecodeVar(FromWhat: BSTR; DecodeWhat: BSTR): Variant; stdcall;

[vonsmith]

dgm4444,
Breaking the Hal brain into functions and subs in general makes sense. I thought about doing this for the XTF Brain. I decided to stick with Hal's linear programming format at least for now.

Two reasons:
1) User's are familiar with the cut & paste script editing in the GetResponse.
2) I'm not sure about function calls, especially to external files, being compatible with the methods used in Hal Representative version of Hal. In particular I have some scope and memory space concerns about passing variables ByRef. I've been hoping that Robert Medeksza or someone knowledgeable could tell me, without a doubt, what is truly compatible.

There are a lot of advantages to using functions and subs. The linear format of the GetResponse gets a little unwieldy to edit at times. There isn't a good way to make variables/functions Private to limit scope, etc. As you say upgrading could be easier by the method you suggest. For now it's another thing to do on my list of Hal projects.

Thanks for the input.


=vonsmith=