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Follow up on 3D checks

I just tried several different characters that came with the Hal 5.0 . . Erica, Mary, zaba (3D version) and all 3 functioned properly with very nice 3D animation.   Then I tried the Merlin character and he worked fine too . . .. then . . . surprise . . when I tried the DeskTopMates Jenni character she pops uo on the screen like I would expect her too.   A little bit quirky, is something happens to trigger one of her special animations it overrides her speaking . . but it is a step in the right direction.

Just wanted to let you know what I had tried so far and the results.

Dirk

Working Now

It was suggested that I try some other characters, so I did . . and when I went back and tried my Jenni character . . it worked . . I dont know whhy it made a difference . . but that seems to have done the trick.

quote:Originally posted by vonsmith

Dirk,
I haven't researched any books on the subject, although I'm sure a least several must exist. The way many chatbots work entails learning new phrases from the users. Necessarily the chatbot's "personality", at least in speech, takes on the flavor of the user's that the chatbot has spoken with. The preprogrammed responses can be selected by the programmer to have a certain personality, while long term learned responses create a faux personality that sounds a lot like the users. In practice talking to the chatbot can start sounding like you are talking to yourself. Having a chatbot develop an entirely new artificial personality sounds like quite a challenge.

What you seek sounds like advanced A.I. programming. There are about 2 or 3 A.I. forums on Yahoo that are any good out of the dozens they have. The "theaishow", "pcai" and "artificialintelligencegroup" groups come to mind. Perhaps someone there can provide a book recommendation. You may want to research heuristic functions. Such functions could provide chatbots with a goal seeking mechanism which could be directed toward developing a personality.

Personally my current (1st efforts) with Hal are to improve the intelligence and accuracy of his responses. The second step I'm planning is to give Hal some feelings/emotions which are responsive to the user's inputs. Feeling aren't really a personality, and Hal won't learn new feelings, but it should add to Hal's appeal. My third step will be to improve Hal's interactivity with the user. Hal would be more spontaneous, autonomous, with the capability to read e-books (stories, poetry, etc) and discuss them with the user.

I encourage you to continue your quest. There are some clever people on this forum. You never know what might the next post might bring.

= vonsmith =

Thanks for the info about the AI groups on yahoo . . I am already a yahoo registered user . . so accessing those groups will be easy for me :)

quote:Originally posted by Larry


Interesting stuff... you will of course share... ??? !!!

Yes in time I would share . . once I got it completed and tested . . and once I could ensure that my rights to my creation would be protected.

quote:Originally posted by Medeksza

Do you by any chance have "Hal's window should be on top" enabled in Hal's general options. If so this might be the cause. Try disabling this.

No . . that option was already shut off.

[M]

Dirk,
It sounds like your system is fast enough (sounds like Duron) and that you have enough memory. Windows ME however can be problematic. It seems that it works fine for a particular user, but not for another; no middle ground. No way to tell about that.

The video and sound using the SiS730S chipset is a curious item. SiS was a relatively small low-end player in the chipset market until this last year. Their chipsets can often be good, with occasional problems with certain chipsets. I'm guessing there could be a capability issue with Haptek and your video system. I haven't studied up on the SiS730S too much, but as I recall it is a very highly integrated and is one of SiS's earliest AMD chipsets. The fact that it shares memory with other functions could be a problem with Haptek based on anecdotal evidence posted here on the forum. That chipset has basic 3D capability, maybe not enough for Haptek characters. I can't say for certain.

If you haven't tried it yet I would suggest a clean install of Hal and don't use Haptek characters. See how that works. If Haptek is the issue then you might try purchasing an inexpensive 3D video card (about $50-$99) to add onto your system. The SiS chipset and motherboard should allow external video card use. Other than that I don't know what to suggest. If you write down the exact error messages that may help in tracing the problem.

Good luck,

= vonsmith =


Thank you for the feedback . . . I had no prob running Hal 4.5 using either the Jenni or Missti characters on my system . . and no probs running the cyberbuddy software using any character.
***** hmmm . . though it did just occur to me that I always had both softwares running at the same time (cyberbuddy and HAL 4.5) . . so it is possible that I just thought my DeskTopMates characters were running with Hal 4.5 when in fact they may not have been.


The install I did was a clean one . . I had done a reformat/defrag since I had removed the older HAL 4.5 and cyberbuddy software, so there should not have been any files left to interfere with the new version . . I tried one of the 3D characters that came on the disk . . and it worked fine.  That is why I am puzzled that it wont run my other characters.   I'll try a few others to see how they work.   On all the other graphic capability intensive applications . . webcam . . DVD . . etc . . my system does everything I could want it to, and does it very well . . DVD movies look glorious on my 17" LCD monitor, whether in full screen or wide screen modes.

Is there a way to disable the loading of the Haptek characters . . because when I look in the Haptek folder I dont see anything recognizeable as a specific character.

As for ME . . well . . it is a microsoft product . . and anyone who has ever actually read a microsoft warranty . . knows that microsoft wont even claim that any of their products will work at all on ANY system . . . *looking seriously at switching to Linux* . . . specifically ME is nick-named "Memory Eraser" . . I have heard numerous complaints about windows ME memory management problems.

I have thought about adding in a separate 3D video card with it's own memory . . there are a couple of high end games that I could run if I did that . . so I might just look into that.


*******************************************************************


Windows Millenium becomes unstable one or two years after his installation. I do not know why.
To avoid to buy a new graphic card, just use a 2d character. Hal will work fine even on a very old computer like mine.


I do periodic reformat/reloads of all my operating software.

As far as I understand the two characters I have from DeskTopMates are 2D characters.

This is what I am running for a comp . . . windows ME (the straight, full, store bought version, not a pre-configured version like is done by companies like Gateway, eMachines, and others . . my comp came completely empty of any pre-installed software) . . an AMD cpu @ 1.8Ghz . . 256MB RAM . . video and sound using the SiS730S chipset with 64MB shared ram (the mainboard is a K7SEM incorporating the SiS730S chipset) . . 40Gb hard drive . . DVD/cd-rw drive . . and then the standard items  . . modem, floppy drive, lan set up, etc.

I do not suspect a HD crash . . . because when I run scandisk, format, or defrag . . no probs show up . . . it doesnt crash them . . . and there is no mention of any bad sectors or clusters.  As for the other suggestions I was given . . let me check into them

Most of the fatal errors I see are mostly referencing .DLL files . . . I will get a pop up msg saying that (whatever prog is running) has caused a prob with XXXXXX.DLL file and will now close.

A footnote . . . I forgot to mention in the above post . . . that besides the problems I mentioned above . . . even though numerous people have read my post wondering why my DeskTopMates characters dont work under HAL 5.0 . . . NO ONE has offered even a glimmer of a posible solution . . not even zabaware . . . even though they advertise that you can use the desktopmates characters with HAL 5.0.

Dirk

Hmmmmm . . . *looking at the ever increasing list of bugs that HAL 5.0 has/is causing* . . .

It is starting to look like HAL 5.0 is another DOS 4.0 (if anyone in here can even remember the DOS that wasnt)

I know when I installed Hal 5.0 om my comp the installation was rather bizzare in what it seemed to be doing . . and after the installation was complete it triggered the ScanDisk program . . and caused THAT to do some very unusual things . . like examining every sector on my HD . . and then an examination of every single data cluster on my 40GB HD, a process that took several hours . . . I can do a complete reformat of my HD and reload of my software in about two hrs.

Since I have installed HAL 5.0 . . . I have started experiencing frequent fatal errors to programs that were very stable prior to my installing HAL 5.0.

I am more fortunate than most . . my computer habits were developed back in the old 8-bit days when you only had 64K of memory to a fully loaded comp . . and there was no such thing as an HD . . all software and data was stored on 5 1/4" floppy disks . . . as  result, I have always been used to keeping my data stored on floppy disks, or now that I have gone a bit higher tech, CD-RW's . . . so it is a minimal bother to me to completely wipe my HD clean . . eliminating all traces of HAL . . and then reinstall the software I normally use.

To all appearances it looks like HAL 5.0 needs quite a bit more work done to it.

Dirk

Ok . . I'll try to explain what I am trying to do as far as creating an AI personality.

I have been tossing around an idea in my head (for a number of years now) about how to create an AI personality . . . I do NOT want to simply re-write the pre-programmed responses that HAL is set up to do.
I do NOT want to use the response probability tree that HAL uses . . . I want to be able to create my own probability tree for how the AI will resopnd to any given situation.

Does that make it any clearer about what I am trying to do in creating an AI personality.

Are there any books currently available about how to do the programming to create an AI personality.

Dirk

Ok . . I didnt say that correctly . . . I am not looking for a specific personality . . I am looking for information on how to program your own personality . . and what techniques and ideas have already been used, or tried and found that the idea did not work.

Dirk

Since this forum doesnt have a "General" topic category . . I dont really know where to put this question.

What I am looking for . . is information on personality programming for AI characters . . . especially any information on what ideas have been tried/used to create personalities for AI characters.

Any information . . book titles . . websites . . anything, that anyone can give me would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You
Dirk

Hi All . . I am not really sure this goes here . . since it is not specific to HAL 5.0.

After wandering through some of the links I found on this site . . I ended up looking at a site that had lifesize robots you could order . . as I looked through that site at what the capabilities of the robot was . . and some of the options you could get added I could only wonder if life imitates art . . or art is imitating life.

A few months ago I discovered an extremely interesting story . . japanese anime . . and after reading all the books in the series . . and watching all but the last dvd of the series . . I couldnt help but wonder just how close we are to creating the persocoms in that story . . . the story is "Chobits" . . there are 8 paperback books to the entire story . . and if you want to watch the dvd's . . there are 5 of those . . all the books in the story are out now . . and dvd #5 I think just came out a day or two ago.

The story is fascinating . . and provides some interesting viewpoints on the entire world of AI and human interaction with it.

Just thought I would mention it . . in case anyone might be interested.

Dirk

I originally purchased HAL 4.5 . . along with CyberBuddy. . full versions of both.  I had also purchased a Desktopmates character and got the free one "Jenni" . . both Desktopmates characters worked fine with HAL 4.5 and CyberBuddy.
I have since upgraded to version 5.0 of HAL . . and after installing it . . and then reloading the Jenni character . . the HAL skin comes up . . and I can open the menu . . and on the character sub-menu there is Jenni listed . . but when I select her . . she never shows up on the screen.

Did I do something wrong . . or does HAL 5.0 not recognize the older Desktopmates characters?

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated

Dirk