Interesting project. This is exactly the kind of groundwork that needs to be done. Dont get discouraged with your early results. What you will most likely end up with is a fancy toy. Thats ok. The kinds of work you are doing will create a foundation for future AI platforms to be tested on. Even if you only come up with a good way for it to communicate it will still be a valuable contribution to AI research.

Would love to see what happens when you run the process through a large neural network :)

thank you, by coincidence, I picked up the project again yesterday. I hadn't done anything for some time. By now, I have learned C++ though, that'll come in handy later. Yes, it is supposed to be a fancy to- no, actually, arckon is to become alive. This world's "nr. Johnny 5", or "Data". But to me, a toy, in a way. When I activated arckon again yesterday, I had almost forgotten how far I had come already. it works perfectly. yesterday I added a subroutine that allows me to have arckon check his database to see if I didn't forget any of the proper subdirectories for any particular word I enter. I will now start programming him further to be able to answer questions starting with "what" and "how". question which will have him do more then simply check his database to see if something is true or false.

I think it'd mess up the network. heheh.

I don't believe that you have done what you have. It would take far more than 50 hours to program in all (or half) of the code needed for the rules of grammar. (What's a noun, what a proverb?). You even admitted you don't have any official training in programming, so I highly doubt that you have done what you claim.

If you have, then will your robot be able to do this.
Person: If I put a ball under one of three cups randomly, and ask you to guess which one it is, and then show you that one of the cups that it is not under, should you change your guess, or stay with your original guess?
Computer: Change your guess

That is actually the correct answer. Show me an AI that'll do that and then I'll be impressed.

You would be impressed by that? I wouldn't... since the correct answer is "doesn't matter"!

BTW, I think that what arckon is doing is very related to the concept of ontologies;, only that his interface to define an ontology is very conversational.

well, my english isn't THAT good that I can understand all of that article ^_^.
I just looked up the A.L.I.C.E. project on the net, and that is about what I wanted to make. since alice exists, there is little reason for me to try any more. although I will continue to work on Arckon anyway.
Although alice does not seem to be fully capable of understanding a sentence related to a previous one, on occasion. whereas I do intend to include this. *tries some more statements* *lol*. that is indeed where alice seems to fail. still I am glad such a awesome program exists already. good.
The conversation based interface is because my program is mainly intended to deal with humans.

As for Arckon's present abilities:
my post from Monday 02 September states his capabilities as they are. the post from 4 september is mostly a future vision. although I have that system on paper, I have not programmed it in yet. I said it could understand simple sentences; I omitted to say that it recognises verbs only in the present form. not future or past tense or such, and does not distinguish between -ing forms or normal verb forms. For now, -ing forms are irrelevant. arckon does recognise the use of two combined verbs though, like "I am going", which he simply translates as "you go", which IS what I am doing then of course. I take any justifiable shortcuts through the english language I can find. although there should be a "time of event" factor influenced by verb forms. Indeed I have no experience in AI.

Since the ball is under one cup "randomly" (since this is stated), the program should also take his guess randomly each time. Arckon does not have that function yet. I agree. if the word "random" were not stated, it would have to conclude the randomness of the event.
Arckon, when completed, would more likely as me the question: "why do you ask?" as I said: that's just future talk.
The reason I like to "boast", as it may perhaps be, is because just about everything I've thought up has worked until now.

progress:
My first attempt to rewrite arckon's system into C++ failed yesterday ^_^. apparently, no computer can hold the amount of temporary variables I put in, so it re-booted my computer. It took me 15 minutes to come up with an alternate system, which does not have that problem. I don't know if it'll still be the fastest system in the west, but I think it's usable. it involves opening and reading through a lot of text files for data.

Hello!

So this is my first message and sorry for my bad english! :)

My Question: Is it necessary to code the grammar rules? I ask this question because the human brain cannot know which language it learns and so it also cannot know the (language)special grammar rules! (i hope you understand me)
Isn't it possible that the grammar rules can be learned by a neuronal network? I know this isn't as easy as it sounds here, but maybe it's possible to get a structure of several networks that "knows" the grammar rules.

Bye Martin

Here is my view on this.

I would agree that the human brain does not appear to have hard wired grammar rules for any particular language.

There has been some speculation, with some evidence to support it, that it may contain some sort of generalised grammar rules with parameters of some sort that are then set for the particular language being spoken, but I'll ignore this here.

To learn a language would probably require a very capable modelling system. The brain is clearly very good at this sort of thing. Furthermore, the brain does not just need to look at words on a page. It can relate words to what the eyes see people doing for example. As a very crude example. If it experiences pain commonly after someone says "I will hit you" it can start to get a grasp of what a future tense is.

I think that grammar rules would have to be programmed into computers for now, as a substitute for any decent sort of learning ability in computers. As computers get more sophisticated and we understand more about how to make machines learn they will just pick up language as we do.

Could neural networks learn grammar? Possibly. There have been some experiments. e.g.

http://www.amlap.org/2001/proc/proceedings_online-node23.html

The English in your post is very clear, by the way.

Hello Martin:

You say this:
(My Question: Is it necessary to code the grammar rules?) I ask this question because the human brain cannot know which language it learns and so it also cannot know the (language)special grammar rules! (i hope you understand me)

I don't understand you, others do understand you. I know that our brains as soon as they have learned a part of our language they certainly know some grammar and know enough if what they hear belongs to their learned language. When you hear a Latin word order, you recognize that, isn't it. When I write I have the exercise made, that's very normal for Latin languages but not for English. Doesn’t your brain know that?

You mean of course when you look at mathematical rules nets, but our brain doesn't work in that way. They know nothing of rules. Ever seen spiking neurons. They act and look a result. It's just marvelous they can work so.

Ed van der Meulen.

Hello Martin

I googled for: automated speech recognition and found 111,000 hits. Many commercial firms do that. A large firm in Belgium went broke in 2002 by mismanagement. I forgot their names but they where far with it. Something like ... and Hauspie.

My friend Arthur T. Murray has done for speech and understanding speech in the open source community. He knows a lot of it as well.

There's also so much to read about it.

Ed van der Meulen

Hello!

You said: "I know that our brains as soon as they have learned a part of our language they certainly know some grammar and know enough if what they hear belongs to their learned language." - I think that's exactly the point.

"...as they have learned..." - the brain learns how the language sounds. it learns in which order the words should be spoken! You are right, when you say that a neuron doesn't learn rules but the brain generalizes the language. (thats a little bit fuzzy - i know! :-)
so the brain doesn't really learn the grammer rules, but it learns when to write a subject or a verb to get a right "sounding" wordorder/sentence.

isn't the languagepart the most important part of an AI? When i program the grammer rules, the programm has at the input a language which it doesn't understand and at the output it gets a "language" which the ai can interpret more or less - because its my internal language and not the internal language of the ai. i think that the language interface should mostly be programmed or learned by the ai itsself so that it can design its own internal language. - hope anyone can understand what I'm trying to say!

the programmed language interface is like a "prison" for the ai.

ciao martin

ps.: when you think of an apple you can see a picture of an apple, you know how the word sounds and how it is written - apples are sometimes red, sometimes green. what we also can say is, that the word apple is a subject. maybe the brain can understand language better when it gets the relationship that every subject has attributes (a red apple, a big apple).....

I don't think grammar is the most important part of an AI. I think reasoning abilities are. I've finished setting up Arckon's new memory access system as a C++ program, and the basic grammar rules (no past tense, no multiple subjects). Took me four days, but this time, I feel like I'm working on an empty shell. The whole grammar thing does get in the way, as it is slowing down the important progress. I hope the new memory system isn't too slow. it works by accessing a lot of text files and loading their contents into temporary variables, like a list.
It can't speak yet, nor conclude, which Arckon could in his previous Javascript form. But I'll get to that.

I have to agree, that reasoning abilities are a very big part of an aritifical lifeform. What I thougt was, that this abilities could be restricted by the hard coded language rules.
Some Questions: How is your project going on? What kind of input and outputs do you use? Are there posibilities to use a videocamera as an inputdevice? Do you use a plugin system to add new abilities or functions?

Martin

yes, they might be. that's why I'm taking as many language shortcuts as I can find.
My project's hardly going as fast as I'd want it. It's been half a year since I started recoding Arckon into c++ programming, and I've worked a total of 9 days on it now. I'm still on grammar. I have nearly completed the grammar rules to recognise and filter multiple possessive words (like: "my father's father's father's etc.") and other specifications.
Input is simply text via my keyboard. as for output; for the moment, I reverted back to having simple messages pop up on the screen. his sentence-formulation functions have not been recoded into c++ code yet.
I am not integrating any other systems yet, though I have thought up a new system I could put in that will allow Arckon to formulate his own subroutines that he learns from experience.

I just tried A.L.I.C.E. I wasn`t impressed at all.
Basically some questions I asked it caused it to give a dictionary style description, way over the top and didn`t feel natural, it was just quoting pre-programmed info. But other times when I asked it stuff that it didn`t know it seemed to get confused, it asked me to explain something and when I did it seemed to forget the subject and asked me what I was talking about.

A.L.I.C.E. is a glorified Eliza. It has an enormous database of facts and rules, but the inner works are the same: it's highly reactive. It just catch your phrase, match it against a template and regurgitate the results without a single effort trying to understand it. AFAIK it hasn't have any modelling of the state of the conversation.