Mark> Real-time speech-to-text is not the problem (though the accuracy rate is still below what is to be preferred -- a problem which your solution does *NOT* address).
Steve> Apparently you haven't been reading my postings carefully enough. On several occations I referred to the general ability to reliably capture pre-identified long words and short phrases, while trashing everything else. You obviously lack the hands-on experience with speech-to-text to recognize either that this is clearly true, or the extreme value of this to my particular application. Your solution relies upon others' software for the recognition since your own software serves mainly as a rather simple controller which "trashes everything else" that you don't pre-process as being relevant. *Your* part of the solution has virtually nothing to do with the accuracy rate other than relying upon the achievements of others. I do understand that accuracy is extremely important to your application. I also understand that your software does nothing to enhance it other than possibly throwing out enough garbage to give the recognition software a little more time to operate Steve> Actually, you have your choice between truly real-time speech-to-text software that has SERIOUIS problems, like it only works with a few-hundred word vocabulary and mis-interprets everything else into that limited vocabulary, or a not-quite-real-time system that won't have the text until several seconds after you stopped talking. Maintaining a smooth conversation with such a system is a CHALLENGE, the solutions to which I desribed in my article. I suspect that with your lack of hands-on experience, that you both entirely missed this distinction, and the need for the workarounds that I used. . I probably have two to three times the hands-on experience with voice applications and text to speech that you do with the bulk of it being fairly recent. I understand the trade-offs in current text-to-speech systems. I understand your perceived "CHALLENGE". I am not impressed by what you decided to take on. You yourself repeatedly trash your own system for it's single-mindedness and lack of conversational skills. Why is smoothness of conversation so important? Why can't there be a pause after each statement? Moore's law is going to take care of all of that pretty quickly. Fundamentally, I believe that you did a poor job of kludging things that didn't need to be kludged RATHER THAN focusing on the truly important knowledge engineering side (and then came over to a knowledge engineering group and presented this *sidetrack* paper as proof you knew what you wee doing? Why aren't you expecting to be ill-met?). Steve> For all of its obvious kludges, Dr. Eliza DOES work and appears to be EXTREMELY useful given enough knowledge from enough people. So you claim with absolutely no proof -- except for your "knowledge base" -- the contents of which others on this list have more than adequately addressed. :-) Steve> The totality of the fine details were WAY too long to include them in a published paper. the REAL problem is that the task was compiled to use the highest real-time priority AND to set the bit that prohibits other tasks from changing that priority. That foreclosed every known way of sacrificing all of the cycles to the task that it chose to take. And you clearly don't understand the internals of programs well enough to understand that all you need to do is take a decompiler and a hex editor and do a little judicious editing. It's all ENGINEERING, dude. You just need to understand what you're doing well enough (i.e. all the way down to the metal) so that you have a true understanding of what all your options are. Steve> Perhaps others on this forum might want to put their comments in here, but you OBVIOUSLY lack current Windows development experience. You are apparently still back in the Apple assembly-language era where you had access to the whole machine, and there was absolutely no reason (other than incompetence) put put in the obvious kludges as I did. Your age is showing. Once again, ROTFLMAO! Sorry dude, I'm one of those high-faluting .NET/SQL Server dudes. I live and breathe Windows and am paid pretty highly to do so. If it's your perception that I don't understand Windows because I understand that *sometimes* it's better/easier to attack the problem beneath Windows rather than fighting with Windows, then you need to get a better understanding of Windows internals. I've been programming Windows since 1986 (Windows 2) and have moved through all the upgrades since then. Are you conversant with .NET 3.5? Can you point to a substantial corpus of publicly available software? I got bored entering my experience but I have yet to see *any*credentials from you. Steve> Also, you OBVIOUSLY lack interpersonal skills. For example, instead of presuming that I am a flaming incompetent, you might have simply asked why I didn't ... instead of proclaiming that since I didn't use methods applicable to an Apple, that it is bad engineering. It is pretty obvious to me why you don't have current work experience to exhibit, as any organization faced with your interpersonal approaches would promptly fire you. ;-) Maybe my interpersonal skills are good enough that they do exactly what I want them to do and maybe I'm smart enough to constantly tailor them to the environment as appropriate. Steve> OK, I'll send you that long paper I mentioned. There are several others, but I hesitate to jam up this forum giving you stuff to read that you will only gloss over and make snide remarks about. Actually, I appreciated this paper. You're clearly a systems guy and are frustrated by people who don't see that almost *everything* is a system and should be dealt with that way. I sympathize fully. My only negative observations are that you don't seem to fully understand the systems yourself before criticizing them -- i.e. you seem to have put in absolutely NO THOUGHT as to why the medical and political systems have *evolved* to the place that they are currently. You need to understand a system *BEFORE* you attempt to change it. Instead, just as with your programming, you assume that -- just because you think you understand the top-most general level -- you understand the entire system. And it is quite clear that you don't take the time to understand systems or people "all the way down to the metal". ----- Original Message ----- From: Steve Richfield To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, April 14, 2008 4:17 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Comments from a lurker... Mark, On 4/14/08, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Steve > Perhaps you can relate your own experiences in this area. Argument from Authority . . . . but what the heck . . . . :-) Earliest scientific computing papers (one from the science side, one from the computing side) Computer Modeling of Muscle Phosphofructokinase Kinetics Journal of Theoretical Biology, Volume 103, Issue 2, 21 July 1983, Pages 295-312 Mark R. Waser, Lillian Garfinkel, Michael C. Kohn and David Garfinkel A Computer Program for Analyzing Enzyme Kinetic Data Using Graphical Display and Statistical Analysis Computers and Biomedical Research, Volume 17, Issue 3, June 1984, Pages 289-301 Serge D. Schremmer, Mark R. Waser, Michael C. Kohn and David Garfinkel Hardware Integration Project - True Omni-font OCR device (1983-1984) Developed software turning any Apple IIe and any fax machine into a true Omni-font OCR reader pages were solved as cryptograms so even *random* fonts were interpretable used 6502 assembly; unloaded the Apple IIe operating system as necessary (memory problems? what memory problems?) AI Project - Case Method Credit Expert System Shell & Builder (1984-1985) Developed in Pascal for Citicorp's FastFinance Leasing System Used by technophobic executives without any problems AI Project - Expert System for Army Logistics Procurement (1986-1987) Developed for/Deployed at Fort Belvoir, VA; Presented at Army Logistics Conference in Williamsburg Part of the Project Manager's Support System AI Project - Project Impact Advisor (1986-1987) Rewrote boss's prototype system implemented in Lisp on special hardware as a PC-based Prolog system Part of the Project Manager's Support System AI/Hardware Project - Neural Network for Diagnosing Thallium Images of the Heart (1987-1988) Successfully convinced top Air Force brass that Air Force doctors were misdiagnosing test pilot check-up images Used Sigma Neural Network hardware boards Hardware Project - Fax Network Switch (1990-1991) Developed for/Deployed by the Australian Government/Embassy for all traffic between Canberra and Washington Subsequently sold to Sony Created multiple terminate-and-stay-resident programs to provide simultaneous 16-fax and dual T1-modem capability under MS-DOS Used Brooktrout 4-port fax boards Hardware Project - Secure Telephone Unit (1991-1992) Developed initial prototype marrying COTS 80286 motherboard, modem, and TI TMS C32000 FPU with custom hardware and software Enhanced and integrated commercially available TI TMS C32000 software for various voice codecs Developed all control software (80286 assembly) Developed all software for debugging custom integrating hardware developed by other company employees Hmmm . . . that's not even ten years with over fifteen to go . . . and I'm boring *myself* to tears despite skipping a bunch of non-relevant stuff . . . . ;-) VERY impressive, but, the subject was the challenges of running real-time AI on non-real-time operating systems, that without very special precautions have their performance trashed by paging, and using software modules that were written to hog 100.0% of the CPU, leaving nothing for the AI part of the application. I saw nothing about such challenges in your somewhat dated resume. I suspect that the underlying problem here is that you may not realize that Microsoft, Nuance, and other major developers have been hiring cheap programmers, a whole roomful of which won't have the experience of either one of us, to write fatware that is completely incompatible with real-time AI, which isn't anywhere on their list of priorities. I suspect that you have little/no experience developing under Windows XP or Vista, which is a giant step backwards for applications like this. Mark>> Good thing that you're smarter than that and know how to trash a machine so your stuff will work. Steve> Given that apparently no one else has been able to make commercial speech-to-text work with real-time AI, I'll accept that as a complement. You shouldn't have. It was pure sarcasm. You need to look harder at what is available out there. Real-time speech-to-text is not the problem (though the accuracy rate is still below what is to be preferred -- a problem which your solution does *NOT* address). Apparently you haven't been reading my postings carefully enough. On several occations I referred to the general ability to reliably capture pre-identified long words and short phrases, while trashing everything else. You obviously lack the hands-on experience with speech-to-text to recognize either that this is clearly true, or the extreme value of this to my particular application. Fitting real-time speech-to-text into a small enough, friendly enough footprint to work with real-time AI is not the problem (although *you* do seem to be having problems doing it with a *GOOD* engineering solution). Actually, you have your choice between truly real-time speech-to-text software that has SERIOUIS problems, like it only works with a few-hundred word vocabulary and mis-interprets everything else into that limited vocabulary, or a not-quite-real-time system that won't have the text until several seconds after you stopped talking. Maintaining a smooth conversation with such a system is a CHALLENGE, the solutions to which I desribed in my article. I suspect that with your lack of hands-on experience, that you both entirely missed this distinction, and the need for the workarounds that I used. Coming up with a worthwhile AI is the problem BUT I haven't seen any sign of such a thing from you. For all of its obvious kludges, Dr. Eliza DOES work and appears to be EXTREMELY useful given enough knowledge from enough people. Steve> It is unclear what happened for you to make your comments in the tone that you used. On first glance it appears that you simply didn't carefully read the article. For example, did you notice that Nuance actually has a patent on how they suck up 100.0% of the CPU, leaving nothing for concurrent AI programs? How about constructively addressing the technical ISSUES instead of sounding like an idiot by making snide comments. If you can't prevent a program from sucking up 100% of your CPU, you aren't competent to be working at this level. There are *all sorts* of ways to stop evil behavior like this to include: a.. pre-allocating memory to yourself (or your AI) before firing up the offending programming Doesn't work for free-standing executables. a.. replacing the operating system pointers to the memory allocation routines to your routines which will then lie to the offender about the amount of memory available Memory isn't the problem - it is the CPU cycles that are the problem. You should read the patent that I cited in the article. a.. working on multiple linked boxes The totality of the fine details were WAY too long to include them in a published paper. the REAL problem is that the task was compiled to use the highest real-time priority AND to set the bit that prohibits other tasks from changing that priority. That foreclosed every known way of sacrificing all of the cycles to the task that it chose to take. The kludges that you are resorting to are just plain *BAD* engineering. There are *ALWAYS* clean work-arounds -- if you're competent enough to find them. Perhaps others on this forum might want to put their comments in here, but you OBVIOUSLY lack current Windows development experience. You are apparently still back in the Apple assembly-language era where you had access to the whole machine, and there was absolutely no reason (other than incompetence) put put in the obvious kludges as I did. Your age is showing. Also, you OBVIOUSLY lack interpersonal skills. For example, instead of presuming that I am a flaming incompetent, you might have simply asked why I didn't ... instead of proclaiming that since I didn't use methods applicable to an Apple, that it is bad engineering. It is pretty obvious to me why you don't have current work experience to exhibit, as any organization faced with your interpersonal approaches would promptly fire you. Steve>>> Then there is the fact that Dr. Eliza operates according to principles that aren't taught in any school and would be unfamiliar without some external education. Mark>> Sounds like voodoo to me -- unless you have all this stuff written up so that you can provide this education (and the education can be validated). Didn't think so. Steve> Perhaps you missed the fact that I already posted that I have several articles that I would gladly send to anyone who requested them. However, there ARE limits to just how much can be packed into a published article. One of them even secured special permission to exceed the maximum length limit, when the WORLDCOMP conference committee couldn't suggest ANY part of it that could be omitted without damaging the rest of it. Perhaps I didn't miss the fact that you didn't send me what I requested. Perhaps I noticed that what you did send me had nothing to do with AI. Perhaps I noticed that what you sent me was not what I would call competent. OK, I'll send you that long paper I mentioned. There are several others, but I hesitate to jam up this forum giving you stuff to read that you will only gloss over and make snide remarks about. Steve> I am new here, having only made one posting and answered queries to that posting. However, if this were MY group, I would remove you as a member for making such snide comments rather than simply explaining your issues and asking for anything you see is missing, like explanatory articles. Okay. Is this e-mail clearer? The snide comments were because your arrogant initial presentation and claims were followed up by an off-topic "paper" that was inexcusably bad (also known as -- you wasted my time). What was bad about the paper? I thought that it was the kludges IN the paper that you were (erroneously) disclaiming. Steve> People working in AI/AGI get LOTS of derision from the rest of CS (and you certainly sound like you come from that extraction) and we certainly don't need any more here, on what should be a safe forum to express our ideas. Not all people working in AI/AGI get the derision. Just the crackpots. Apparently, you would know. For the record, my MSE is in Artificial Intelligence and I've done doctoral work in Machine Learning and Human Decision-Making. So I'm definitely an AI/AGI person -- but the source of the derision is my ENGINEERING side (which is necessary for competent AI/AGI). Proof by obsolete authority is hereby acknowledged and rejected. If your ideas are good enough, you shouldn't need a safe forum. I don't. I have made hundreds, perhaps thousands of postings on other unsafe forums, and have yet to run into an asshole like you. If you avoid sounding like an arrogant know-it-all, this *IS* a safe forum. Hmm, sometimes stating what is obvious in one context sounds arrogant in another context. OPEN MINDED people, when they hear something that doesn't sound right, ask questions and drill down until they eventually determine the accuracy (or lack thereof) of a statement. You have obviously decided NOT to do this, with your apparent defense being that on THIS forum, that I should know better than say what I said without including full support with the statements. Being new, as I clearly stated, I obviously didn't know WHAT (in your mind) needed to be included, so I simply offered articles as needed. Apparently, that just wasn't good enough for YOU, though it was apparently OK with everyone else here. Do I hear any objections from anyone ELSE here? You've merely been a *TROLL* and gotten the appropriate response. Thanks for playing but we have no parting gifts for you. Who is the "we" you are referencing? Do you have a mouse in your pocket, or is that the Royal "we"? YOU are the only snide asshole/troll whom I have had the displeasure of observing on this forum. Can you point to anyone ELSE here who acts as you do? Steve Richfield ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
