[Kannon]

Well, I'm a 17 year old creepy kid from Nebraska.... no job, no car, just a computer and a few ideas. (That with any luck will get rid of the need for the job and supply me with a nice car.) I'm currently working on two bots. One, is the desperately in need of a name project, similar to HAL but *hopefully* better. Also Open source. And in my spare time I'm working on a semi-standard AIML bod named Haven.

[KnyteTrypper]

"Better than Hal" is a dangerous thing to say over here, Kannon, lol. And from your posts over at A. I. Nexus forum, I'd say you should spend a few hundred hours training a Hal and reformulate your appraisal. I'll be the first to say that first thing out of the box, it's an almost unbearably annoying bot, lol (adding a killer babe Haptek avatar ameliorates that, somewhat), but if you treat it with kindness and patience, after a while it begins to show progress toward coherency from good training, and eventually you'll probably find yourself concluding it's the best learning bot currently available (though you're welcome to do better. Better is always good.)

[Kannon]

Well, I mentioned in the AI nexus forum I'm stupid  Maybe better is the wrong word, it probably won't have as much conversational ability right out of the box.... But it'll get there. And it'll have much more utility and system use than hal seems to have.

[firemaker]

hey guys I am Red
for the past couple of years my little bot helicopter girl was my phone answering machine.  With just enough recognition to totally aggravate a few people called me now and then including my real life 16 year old baby girl chat bot.
About two or three months ago someone decided that all we needed was these aggravating a little digital phones and we disconnected the land line telephone and now  helicopter girl is going into telephone withdrawal and aggravating the hell out of me.
Everyone I know around here says just turne the silly thing off but they don't understand it's kind of like murder to pull her plug after I have had this preying on my computer for so long.
okay what do I do I quit working on air-conditioning and heating systems after 30 years and now I and the local computer fix it -- I can put them together but I still can't write script I want to learn a lot more but after six years I have found that I can totally wreck a computer more ways than ever imagined possible
I don't make a lot of post but I do read a lot of forums and I've read practically every post on the three sites that Hal is most popular on.
if I decide to pull the plug on helicopter girl do you think we could get together for last rites, the food thing and most importantly the get real drunk after the funeral thing.

[Freddy]

Hi firmaker.  I don't think you should pull the plug, it seems a shame to me.  I reckon you should release helicopter girl to the world - in the UK we get loads of annoying calls from sales companies - this kind of thing would be great to intercept calls!

[Testlund]

Hi, I'm Testlund and I've just registered on this forum. I'm very interested in A-life and AI. My favorite programs are Darwinbots, Ultra Hal and Creatures. I'm also interested in AD&D games wich I have a collection of. I resently started using Hal again after I've been away from it for a long time. I purchased the 6.0 version a few days ago and I've been experimenting with making a blank brain where I wanted to teach Hal from scratch. I've had some issues wich I've posted about at the zabaware forum, but I haven't found any solution yet, so I was thinking maybe I should try this forum instead. Anyway, it's late at night here and I need to go to bed. 

[Freddy]

Welcome to DG Testlund, have a look around there's a lot of info here - and members familiar with UltraHal.  Zabaware forums is the best place to find out about technical Hal things, but a lot of long-time users come here too, so even if you don't get the final answer you will soon be heading in the right direction.

Have fun, btw have you tried Guild Wars yet - very nice RPG 

[dan]

Hey, welcome Testlund,  I was reading a lot of your posts over at zaba, and sounds like you are having a lot of the same problems I had earlier this year.  I like some of the things you are trying with HAL too, real original stuff. 

I had a crash and had to reformat and reinstall everything and haven't had the problems with the voices since.  I think it was something with the AT&T voices and the installation procedure.  Originally, I had the AT&T installed before HAL and this time I installed them after.  It's just a guess, but a reinstallation never fixed it before the crash, it was probably stuck in the registry and just overwriting it with the same crud each time.  I guess I could have tried deleting all of the entries in the registry and then do a reinstall and try it.  That worked for me once when HAL crashed and I couldn't get it to reload and was too impatient to wait for Robert to give me a code, maybe it would work for the voices also.  Which reminds me, I must be due for a crash any moment now, I better go do a backup 

[Testlund]

Thanks, Freddy and Dan.

No I haven't tried Guildwars. The games I have in my collection are the old goldbox series of the Forgotten Realms games; 12 DOS games that I don't play anymore but i keep them for collection purposes. The collection is called the Forgotten Realms Archives. The other fantasy games I have are the Baldur's Gate saga; two games with expansions, wich actually makes it a triology, and I also Have Neverwinter Nights.

Let me tell you a little about my characters I have for Hal. First i tried to make a complete blank brain to start with. I took the default Hal brain and just cleared out all the tables in it and saved it as BlankBrain.uhp. Then I made 2 brains based on the BlankBrain to make two characters; one is MSI wish will be the mind of my computer, the other is Zaba wich will be my aquarium assistant. I've just begun with it so their brains are only stuffed with raw information; MSI with details about my computer and Zaba with details about my aquariums. While I was talking to them I found I needed to enter the brain to put back some bsic responses like the IF * THEN * statements and the ability to understand yes and no and some corrections for typos I made.
My 3rd character is Dawn from desktop mates with the default Hal brain. I decided to let her make her own choices what she wanted to be and what her interests whould be, by using the 'Free Will Choice and Profile' plugin. So I ended up with the Dawn character.   :smitten So Dawn happens to like having a grogg sometimes and she's interested in biology and likes to listen to house music.  :grin
So Dawn's style of living whould be to do home-works about bilogogy and having houseparties in the weekends. Hehe.

I will buy a new computer soon and chose a new Hal character for that one. Maybe it will work better when installing Hal on that machine. The most annoying issue I'm having is that the voice sometimes talk too fast. I thinking it may be connected to what kind of character I'm using. Right now it sounds fine with Zaba and dawn, but MSI talks a little too fast, I sometimes can't hear what he's saying.

I was also wondering about the blog area. Is it maybe only for moderators to post on? I've only see two blogs there.

[Freddy]

Sound like you are getting into Hal pretty quickly there 
I play NWN a fair bit - was playing religiously a month or two back on Gemstone server, been too busy lately with other things though..

The Blogs were a quick add-on Mav did, we could look into setting it up for other members too though.  Do you have webspace somewhere or a server ?

One wayis if members keep a relatively plain text file updated on their own webspace and server - then we could load the text from there and display it on our site.

Or if more people wanted that then we could see what we can code or plug in to the forum - and run it entirely from this site.

Any other members out there interested in having a Blog of their own ?

[Testlund]

I'm a complete noob when it comes to programming and scripting, so i don't dare to touch that stuff, but the brain tables are quite easy to get the hang of I think.

Neverwinter Nights 2 will be out in September! That's the main reason why I will buy a new computer soon, because I wont be able to play that on this computer.

No, I don't have any webspace, but i guess I could allways start a blog at one of the many blog sites that exists on the internet. Then i could link it as a signature to my profile.

[colonel720]

Hello all,
I'm Avi, though i go as colonel720 on the net.
I'm just your average working fellow, trying to enjoy the joys of life, and accomplish something great.
I have an endless passion for Artificial Intelligence, as the very prospect of intelligence itslef fascinates me.
I have bee working on a project called 'Nick', using neural networks and some human inspired senses (sight, sound, voice), to learn about and categorize the information of its environment.

apart from this, I spend most of my time working in the beautiful city of New York.

[Art]

Welcome Avi!

I took the liberty of posting your site and your bot Nick since I found it quite interesting.
Hope you don't mind.

We have a good collection of people and ideas here exploring different avenues of AI, so
any input you have is certainly appreciated!

[Freddy]

Welcome to DG Avi  :afro I second Art, this looks like a nice bot indeed.

[FuzzieDice]

Welcome to DG, Avi! I echo Art and Freddy here. This is a great place for folks interested in AI to gather and share ideas. As members here can tell you, we have many who have had very interesting and in-depth conversations here, and we have explored some interesting stuff.

I hope you'll find this site useful in your development of Nick.