In response to Richard Loosemore below,
A. T. Murray wrote:
MindForth free open AI source code on-line at
http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/mind4th.html
has become a True AI-Complete thinking mind
after years of tweaking and debugging.
On 22 January 2008 the AI Forthmind began to
think effortlessly and almost flawlessly in
loops of meandering chains of thought.
Users are invited to download the AI Mind
and decide for themselves if what they see
is machine intelligence and thinking. The
http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/m4thuser.html
User Manual explains all the steps involved.
MindForth is the Model-T of True AI software,
roughly comparable to the state of the art in
automobiles one hundred years ago in 1908.
As such, the AI in Forth will not blow you
away with any advanced features, but will
subtly show you the most primitive display
of spreading activation among concepts.
The world's first publicly available True AI
achieves meandering chains of thought by
"detouring" away from incomplete ideas
lacking knowledge-base data and by asking
questions of the human user when the AI is
unable to complete a sentence of thought.
The original MindForth program has spawned
http://AIMind-I.com as the first offspring
in the evolution of artificial intelligence.
ATM/Mentifex
Okay now you got my attention.
Arthur: what has it achieved with its thinking?
Up until Tues.22.JAN.2008 (four days ago) the AI
would always encounter some bug that derailed its
thinking. But starting three years ago in March
of 2005 I coded extensive "diagnostic" routines
into MindForth. Gradually it stopped spouting
gibberish (a frequent complaint against Mentifex AI),
but still countless bugs kept popping up that I
had to deal with one after another.
Suddenly on 22.JAN.2008 there were no "show-stopper"
bugs anymore -- just glitches in need of improvement.
Can you show an example of its best cogitations?
You can tell it a multitude of subject-verb-object (SVO)
facts, and then you can query it in various ways.
Now the following thing is a very new development.
Six years ago, when I was gearing up to publish AI4U,
my goal for the AI output was (then) that it should
parrot back each sentence of input, because, after
all, each SVO concept had been activated by the
mere fact of input. A few weeks ago, that goal changed
to what the AI does now -- it briefly activates only
one concept at a time, of either input or reentrant
output. So now if you enter "cats eat fish", the
AI briefly activates each concept, coming to rest
on the FISH concept (which is new to the AI).
Immediately the SVO mind-module starts to generate
a sentence about the active FISH concept, but the
verbPhrase module fails to find a suffciently
active verb. The "detour" variable then detours
the thought process all the way up the Chomskyan
syntactic superstructure to the SVO module, or the
English module even higher, or maybe to the Think
module higher still (I don't remember without
inspecting the code), where the detour-flag calls
the whatAuxSDO (what-do-Subjects-do) module to
ask the human user a question about FISH.
As the AI stands right now today since 24.JAN.2008,
the output will look like
FISH WHAT DO FISH DO
If the human user (or person in job category "attendant")
answers the question, then the AI knows one more fact,
and continues the dialogue with the human user.
But (and this is even more interesting) if the human
user just sits there to watch the AI think and does
not answer the question, the AI repeats the question
a few times. Then, in a development I coded also
on Tues.22.JAN.2008 because the AI display was so
bland and boring, a "thotnum" (thought-number)
system detects the repetitious thought inherent
in the question, and diverts the train of thought
to the EGO self-resuscitation module, which
activates the oldest "post-vault" concept in
the self-rejuvenating memory of the AI Mind.
Right now the AI just blurts out the name of
the oldest concept (say, CATS) and I need to
code in some extra activation to get a sentence
going.
But if you converse with the AI using known words
or if you answer all queries about unknown words,
you and the AI gradually fill its knowledge base
with SVO-type facts -- not a big ontology like
in the Cyc that Stephen Reed worked on, but still
a large domain of subject-verb-object possibilities.
You may query the KB in several ways, e.g.:
what do cats eat
cats
cats eat
and so forth, entered as a line of user input.
If it is just producing "meandering chains of thought"
then this is not AI, because randome chains of thought
are trivially easy to produce (it was done already in
the 1960s).
The difference here in January of 2008 is that the
words forming the thoughts are conceptualized,
and thought in MindForth occurs only by
"spreading activation." Eventually there
will be fancier forms of thought, such as
prepositional phrases, but in this
"Model-T of artificial intelligence"
the initial goal was to get the very
most basic AI up and running.
Richard Loosemore
Richard, thank you for taking the time to ask
your above questions about MindForth. I would
like to answer all such questions to the best
of my ability, because even to be proved wrong
is to learn something.
