[pygmalion]

I have been developing an Internet based system AI system for about 2 years now (actually longer with the prototype).

The project is hosted on SourceForge as "Open Pandora's Box" (I know Pandora is an over used name for AI projects)

https://sourceforge.net/projects/openpandorasbox/

The website is hosted on the AI Wikia,

http://ai.wikia.com/wiki/Pandora

I am looking for feedback on the projects features, design and the bots learning and conversational ability.  As well as some direction as to future direction.

You can interact with a Pandora instance on the website through the web, IRC or email.  If you are keen you can download the install which provides a much more sophisticated GUI.  Her learning ability is quite good, better than most bots I seen, but I do admit I have spent more time programming her learning ability, than teaching her things, so the instance I am hosting does not have a very big knowledge base.

If you wish to provide more than feedback, the project is always looking for new developers.

Thank you,

[Bragi]

Hello,
Looks like you put some serious work in it already. I'm impressed by the number of senses you already have and plan to implement.
Question: if it echoes back the input, does it do anything else with the data except relate to the next sentence? What if the next statement isn't really related to the previous one?

[Freddy]

Managed to have a quick chat with her today on IRC.  I see what you mean about her not knowing much yet.  She repeated a lot of things I said to her.  I think if I knew how to teach her then maybe that would help.  It's looking good though, perhaps some guidance on how we should direct our chats at this stage would be handy.

Keep up the good work  

[pygmalion]

She relates all sequential sentences.  In IRC she also keeps track of users and can keep track of multiple concurrent discussion if people are using the <user>: in the discussion, otherwise it is had for her to follow, as it is for me in an IRC chat as well.

Every relationship is fuzzy, so even if a response had nothing to do with the previous sentence, if would never be getting a very big correctness rating, where as real responses would, but she would need a lot of responses for that to work out.

The main way to teach her is mimic and response, but she can also learn by association.

i.e. if you say "The sky is blue" she will understand that, because she knows that the sky is a noun and blue is an adjective (from her Wiktionary sense), so she would associate them.

Then you could ask her, "Is the sky blue?" and she would say "yes" or a word that means yes.

"Is the sky yellow?" would be false, but if you said, "The sky is yellow" it would then be true, and "The sky is not yellow" false again, "Is the sky not blue?" would be false.

Currently I am working on defining mathematical thinking, which is difficult, parsing math sentence is easy, but thinking how a child actually understands what 3 is, or why 2+2=4 is much more difficult, and that is what I am interested in.

[DaveMorton]

I think that the most difficult part of teaching her math is the "why", rather than the "what". Being a computer-based entity, her innate math skills are pretty much perfect, out of the gate. What would need to happen is to "disconnect" her math skills from the computer that operates her, and therein lies some difficulty, as well.

[Bragi]

@gcc: if you want to have the ai figure out the why itself, that's hard (is there even always a why?). Most humans find this a tough task. If, on the other hand, you use the same trick as most humans do and simply tell it why, so that it can can take over what someone else has figured out, without having to think for itself, it becomes as easy as recording every other data. (you'd be surprised how often we do this)
@pygmalion: Keeping track of multiple users on the same channel is indeed hard if there is no name attached to the input. I solve this by maintaining a channel for each user. Problem solved for the moment (as long as there is no audio or video, which has more info, like voices and faces).
Is your system also able to handle multiple part of speeches for a single word? Like for colors, thy can be adjectives and nouns: that blue is pretty.

[pygmalion]

RE: math
I think I figured something out on math last night.  At first I thought a number was a thing, like 1234.  But in talking to my 5 year old last night, I figured out that is entirely wrong.
I have Pandora understanding the numbers 1-10 and basic countering, i.e. 1 is before 2, 3 is after 2.  But was trying to think of how to get her to know 56 is before 57, without hard coding anything.
So I asked my 5 year old if 55 was bigger than 45, and he said yes.  I said "how to you know?", he said because 5 is bigger than 4.

We only really have a concept of 1 - 10 (ten fingers), 11 is actually a sequence 1 and 1, 1234 is actually a sequence of 4 objects, 1, 2, 3, 4. We only know that 56 is bigger than 45 by taking each digit by itself, same for adding and multiplication etc.  So I think I can teach Pandora some basic math the old fashion way, without a math co-processor, ... but she will probably need a calculator to divide big numbers just like us...

RE: blue
Yes, having words be both nouns and verbs and adjectives is tough, more importantly having words have multiple meanings.  Pandora has support for multiple meanings, and takes which ever meaning is most conscious.  This is what we do, but we frequently get to the end of a sentence and know that it did not make sense, so go back and read it again and use a different meaning.  But I have not implemented that yet.  Most children have problems with multiple means as well, it normally isn't until grade 1 or so that they begin to get it.  The grade 1 brain is much tougher to implement than the preschool brain...

[Freddy]

That's interesting how your son was able to give the reason why one number looked bigger than the other.  I tend to think that the more we do something, the more it becomes second nature and we eventually forget exactly how we do some things.   I have had this experience while doing a web design course I am currently on - for years I have known exactly how I do something but when it comes to explaining my methods I am often stuck.