voices: Main

Rebound

(Kass) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 06:46:40 GMT

After pretty much ignoring Voices for an extended period of time, I suddenly got the urge to work on it and programmed my little heart out for a good number of hours against my better judgement, as I have a pile-up of other work that I should be doing, but don't really feel like confronting.

At any rate, the result is that Aida is finally back up to the point at which she used to be, when she debuted at the meta art show at the end of my undergraduate career. Only her codebase has undergone two significant rehauls since then, so she appears to be far less buggy in general.

Though there's still a lot of basic things I want to look into... creating a syntax so that rules can contain live elements (so pronouns don't have to be handled in retarded ways), for one... and that's probably the most pressing (not to mention, most irritating) item on the list. I have an empty table in the database at the moment, reserved for holding recent chat history... so I have to implement some mechanism to actually start filling that and then I can start thinking about opportunities that creates.

My rule handling is much more robust now, though still not perfect. Now I've managed to program myself into a corner in that the storage and identification of rules is extremely efficient, but translating them back is a distinct pain in the ass. Stack onto that the fact that I'm still hacking out a pronouns solution (which I'm terribly ashamed of) and it's really pretty ugly. So those are my biggest priorities at the moment.

Still, I'm happy. It's nice to have the eavesdropper back in the community. :P

For the heck of it

(Kass) — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 07:44:50 GMT

So since the last news post, I have (1) graduated, (2) moved back home to the SF Bay Area, (3) accepted an offer of graduate study at the University of Southern California, (4) started teaching a web design course for middle school to high school aged students, hosted at UC Berkeley.

In the midst of all that, I did a massive rehaul of the Voices code (which including a restructuring of the database schema!) so that's cool. Haven't really made any progress as far as making Aida do different things, but -- as always -- the hooks are in place for further development.

I honestly couldn't tell you how much more I'll be working on this project, though I definitely want to keep doing so when I feel so inclined. For the next two months, though, I'll be fairly heavily swamped with teaching and then it'll be an almost immediate dive into a new life in Los Angeles as an Interactive Media major.

We'll see, I guess!

"meta" Opening Night

(Kass) — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 00:28:58 GMT

Just a picture that one of my 160b classmates took of our opening night. I was only able to stay for about an hour of the opening because of illness, but everything seemed to be going swimmingly when I left. More pictures can be found in the Download section.

Two months later...

(Kass) — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 22:55:04 GMT

Whoops. :x Kind of neglected to update the front page... oh well.

I've been encouraged to focus on the "art" aspect of Voices rather than the programming part, so that's what I've been doing, though I got some minor programming bits and pieces done. We're coming upon the end of the quarter, and you know what that means... panic time! I totally followed that timeline up until about W5. Oh well.

Tomorrow is Scholar's Day, where I'll be giving a short presentation on my work with Voices... should be excitingish. Then next week is the opening of the art show for our 160B class which we still haven't decided on a name for... sigh. Will post up details of that as soon as they're definitely settled.

Better work on my materials for tomorrow... ::cough::

Public Chatroom Reopened

(Kass) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 20:28:22 GMT

Thanks to a couple solid hours of debugging, I finally have a build stable enough to leave in a chatroom all the time. She's not uber cool to hang out with, admittedly, but she's the build that I'm using in my test community... so it all works out.

Post-break Progress Report

(Kass) — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 18:45:14 GMT

Winter break was very productive. :)

Most of it was spent rewriting a lot of the code and cleaning it up so that it wasn't so convoluted and buggy. Previously I was using a relatively inefficient method for matching phrase patterns with multiple words in the "blanks"... that has been improved significantly.
The memory leak problem was solved (as far as I can tell, at least.)
Currently the MySQL database connection will time out after a given amount of time and Aida will crash as a result... still have to look into solving this one and I'll be giving it my full attention now that I've caught up the rewriting to where I used to be.
Some other things I will be focusing on next will be implementing a substitution syntax, which will allow rules and phrases to be added to the database with veritable blanks in them that will be filled automatically with the appropriate terminology. For example: I know that <pronoun> birthday is tomorrow.
Following that will be examination into developing awareness of the date/time and awareness of first, second, and third person speaking.

Start of 160B: Presentation Outline

(Kass) — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 11:36:44 GMT

WHAT IS IT?

voices is the framework software for the creation of chatterbots that serve as virtual database administrators. This framework already contains all the necessary information for a chatbot that is able to store and recall information, among other things, so all a new programmer would have to do is customize the rules that determine what kind of information should be accepted.
(Truth is that I'm just programming it this way so that I can make an army of chatbots, each with different purposes, but all functioning in the same basic way. But theoretically, anyone could take the code and make their own easily, too.)
The goal of voices is not to create a super artificial intelligence or even pass the Turing test (i.e. make people believe that the bot is human), but to simply create a system in which everyday, non tech-savvy people can store and recall information effortlessly on literally infinite variety of topics.
If you like, think of it as a chatbot-style Wikipedia.

HOW IS IT DONE?

Java code and MySQL database, the latter is on a server that is running on my desktop computer.
The chatrooms I use are IoCM chatrooms, which is the CMS that powers this website. All IoCM sites come with the capability of creating relatively nice chatrooms and I borrowed some of the client-side code as a base for creating the connection code for my chatbots. While I could theoretically write more code to connect my bots to any other sort of chatroom service (that provided an API), I have a community of friends who use IoCM chatrooms for kicks, so they're my usual testing fodder.
The primary method for categorizing data is by tagging: the practice of using simple words or phrases – which is a method of describing that can easily be cross-referenced by computers – to describe other sorts of media that are not so easily understood by our digital desktop friends. In this case, we're using tags to describe labels.

WHY? or also known as, WHY IS THIS ART?

I've been extremely intrigued by the combination of human resources and technology to create information databases that are more comprehensive than one single person could ever possibly need. Wikipedia is probably the most obvious example of this synergy; the 20Q.net AI game is another. This project is another shot at creating an opportunity for more of this sort of synergy, as well as celebrating the idea in general.
I've also been examining the concept of intelligence and the process by which humans recall and store information, in an attempt to divine methods which the AI may also be able to use. A number of the tactics I've employed when teaching the AI when to store information is based on tricks that we homo sapiens use to learn as well, such as sentence structure and phrase patterns.
The whole entire idea is also extremely entertaining by itself, with high novelty value. Who doesn't want an AI whose responses and actions are completely tailored to your design? But not many people have the requisite programming knowledge, time, or energy to create their own. By designing the framework software so that all kinds of people can contribute to its databases, this allows the development of an AI's knowledgebase to proceed much quicker. In other words, it's a small step at making the technology as a whole a bit more accessible to the rest of the world.

Better something than nothing

(Kass) — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 18:04:38 GMT

So winter break has come and gone and I didn't get as much done as I would have liked, but I did make significant progress. Since the last update, I've fixed the memory leak issue and rewritten the rule identification to be more flexible, among a few other minor things.

Of all the code that needs to be rewritten, I did maybe one third of it... and I think it was the hardest third. :P Classes don't start until next week, though, so I have this weekend to tie up the loose ends... and it will be easier to work now that I'm closer to the database.

Round one down

(Kass) — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 01:06:48 GMT

I imagine this website will go quiet for a month, as 160A has finished and I won't be under a severe obligation to update frequently anymore. :P However, I'm hoping that I will still do some work in between now and the next quarter. Specifically I'd like to clean up the most recent code that I've been adding in, fix that JVM problem that's occurring, etc. so that I can get back to working on new and wonderful things when 160B comes around.

The About page has been bloated into an About section, containing the majority of the text that I wrote up for 160A's final paper. (you can find the full text in the downloads section... I'm not sure why I uploaded it there, as I'm sure most people don't care... completionist's habit, I suppose.) And an official public chatroom has been added, for which I am running a full time Aida for people to interact with. Again, I'm not sure why... since I can easily just move her back and forth to other chatrooms for testing... and with the current JVM problem, she's going to crash eventually and will require a manual restart.

But I guess it's in the principle. I made a build that doesn't suck and might be worth long term interaction, so there you have it. XP

In the meantime... I want a nap.

We have to write a paper too?

(Kass) — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 09:34:01 GMT

As if the hours and hours of coding work weren't enough. We were told to gather up at least three outside influences/inspirations to our projects... so here're my three. Funnily enough, none of them are chatbots.

Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
The 20 Questions AI - http://y.20q.net/
FrivLib - no link, darn you Lexi.

Didn't get as much done this week as hoped... blaming it on lack of sleep. I don't even know why I'm still up now. Even so, everything's still looking good. Updated the timeline in the meantime.