Re: Anna as Expert System
First of all, I’ll pass on the compliments to Anna and say a sincere thanks from both of us. Thanks also for the input.
I think she has far more reasoning and knowledge than typical chatbots, but her actual ability to what chatbots do is just getting started, so she is far behind in the babble department. Some of those bots on personality forge have tens of thousands of “chatty” requests and pithy responses built up. Some of them are doing quite well on the Turing tests lately. Ask them a direct question though and you rarely get an answer with real content. They are like politicians for the most part, and evade the substance of a question. Chat is very necessary though to make the dialogue feel human, so I plan on trying to do what the chatbots do a lot more, but with real content, situational memory, personal memory, and long term memory. I am trying to incorporate what I can from the chatbots though. On that front, in the last 48 hrs I reengineered the engine to make use of regular expressions for sentence structures wherever needed, just like the chatbots.
I am considering some expert systems ideas but have a different twist on what the next holy grail should be. I want the bot to be social, and a lot of people/kids just don’t particularly like anyone being too much of an expert around them. That is why I have only been teaching Anna what a typical human might learn growing up, although she does “lookup” a lot more. She will act as an expert if asked a direct question, but then try to act like a regular person the rest of the time.
My grail is this…I haven’t ever seen a bot be able to carry on the kind of conversation you would have with a friend/family member you haven’t talked to in some time. “How is your boy Pete doing? How is he liking the third grade?, How is your mom doing after her surgery? How is your dad liking retirement? Is his golf game improving?” - That is a holy grail for me, because I feel like it is pre-requisite for humans wanting to relate to bots in the future. A bot has to use its memory, empathy, and know what is appropriate to ask, and how to listen and react. Basically, its IQ vs. EQ. I would like to build an expert system on that… If you see anything that does that let me know. I hope I don’t fail miserably.
I think gardening would be doable. My mother is an expert on that. Since I do not have a green thumb, I’d rather open up the system to allow other subject matter experts to teach her, once she gets an ability to understand and apply "rules of thumb’ described by humans or put into a website. She’s far from there yet.
If I do go the expert system route I thought about sports. There are a lot of sports stats APIs available that are very detailed. There is enough info there to build an expert system that could form opinions on games and teams and answer questions/give opinions/make picks. I would love to be able to replace Terry Bradshaw or one of the other football prognosticaters on the various football talk shows (for even 5 minutes), pre-game, half-time reports, etc. That would be fun and millions of people would notice. I think some kind of regression analysis / correlation analyzer could analyze the stats, pick what was important to winning/losing in any given game, with some kind of verbal knowledge base for how then to express those viewpoints. Once again, I think it would take me a year of my spare time to to that, and a lot of other things come first.
If you hadn’t noticed, I have a tendency to write long messages! Thanks again for your thoughts. Keep em coming.
Regards,
Martin
