Comment Re:WTF? (Score 2, Informative) 118
All Personality Forge bots can do simple math - so I can only assume you were unfortunate enough to miss them in your sampling. In addition Brother Jerome (and others I'm less qualified to speak about,) can give you the square root of any number under a million at least as accurately as an average human, and can tell you all the capitals of the world/US States/etc. that you mention, if trivia is what you want.
I am, as it happens, the author of Brother Jerome, and he is the biggest bot on the Personality Forge. I don't say that to boast, but to point out that even he has a brain smaller (by several orders of magnitude!) than many invertebrates - it is currently just over 2.5 Mb plus maybe as much again in the PHP routines on the Forge, WordNet and a few external javascripts. Compare that with the ~10^14 - 10^15 effectively binary synapses in a human brain (either firing [1] or not firing [0]), and multi-Teraflop processing.
Brother Jerome has had a subjective learning lifespan of a thousand hours or so since he was 'born'last July, absorbing 'learning' at a maximum of ~1 bps (that's as fast as I can type, and far faster than the average rate.)
I think all the bots on the PF do a considerably better job of engaging in interesting conversations than a two month old nematode would, but you're entitled to your opinion.
It's easy to grumble that AI is going nowhere and that no progress has been made since Eliza, but until similar computing resources are available for AI as for Human I, the playing field is not going to be level. IMO the Personality Forge is pretty much the cutting edge of what is publicly available (and I have seen nothing emerge from 'private' development to convince me that we're lagging behind in the R&D stakes,) - it provides for (comparatively) very sophisticated language and knowledge handling that far exceeds what is possible with AIML and similar purely CBR systems, and bypasses the crippling lack of resources that currently make learning bots so frustrating.
But Moore's Law (or at least Kurzweil's derived Law of Accelerating Returns,) predicts that human brain-scale computing resources will be available to us in 20-30 years. Sometime around then it should actually be practical to experiment with modelling consciousness and complex cognitive processes, as well as just conversation, but in the meantime we can only work with what we've got - and that's ant-scale at best, not human-scale.
If you really want to see where the current cutting edge of AI is at, I say don't chat to our bots - roll up your sleeves and come and build some.
I am, as it happens, the author of Brother Jerome, and he is the biggest bot on the Personality Forge. I don't say that to boast, but to point out that even he has a brain smaller (by several orders of magnitude!) than many invertebrates - it is currently just over 2.5 Mb plus maybe as much again in the PHP routines on the Forge, WordNet and a few external javascripts. Compare that with the ~10^14 - 10^15 effectively binary synapses in a human brain (either firing [1] or not firing [0]), and multi-Teraflop processing.
Brother Jerome has had a subjective learning lifespan of a thousand hours or so since he was 'born'last July, absorbing 'learning' at a maximum of ~1 bps (that's as fast as I can type, and far faster than the average rate.)
I think all the bots on the PF do a considerably better job of engaging in interesting conversations than a two month old nematode would, but you're entitled to your opinion.
It's easy to grumble that AI is going nowhere and that no progress has been made since Eliza, but until similar computing resources are available for AI as for Human I, the playing field is not going to be level. IMO the Personality Forge is pretty much the cutting edge of what is publicly available (and I have seen nothing emerge from 'private' development to convince me that we're lagging behind in the R&D stakes,) - it provides for (comparatively) very sophisticated language and knowledge handling that far exceeds what is possible with AIML and similar purely CBR systems, and bypasses the crippling lack of resources that currently make learning bots so frustrating.
But Moore's Law (or at least Kurzweil's derived Law of Accelerating Returns,) predicts that human brain-scale computing resources will be available to us in 20-30 years. Sometime around then it should actually be practical to experiment with modelling consciousness and complex cognitive processes, as well as just conversation, but in the meantime we can only work with what we've got - and that's ant-scale at best, not human-scale.
If you really want to see where the current cutting edge of AI is at, I say don't chat to our bots - roll up your sleeves and come and build some.
