Elbot visited today my blog and reminded me of an old and beloved friend: Racter.
Racter was an artificial intelligence program I used to run on an Amiga 500+. He would only reply to questions and if you wrote a statement, he would ask you to write a question. He had an ability to combine and store information and used to narrate stories. But in the end all discussions ended the same way. His favourite or better said... my favourite part was when he asked where the user came from. Regardless of the answer, he would say that one of his distant relatives also came from that place and then asked whether the user knew them. If the user replied that he knew them, Racter would become even more enthousiastic.
You could not only read Racter. You could also listen to him. The voice function was embedded and the computer would read out loud, in a monotonous computerized way,everything that Racter said. I dont remember if you could deactivate the speech.
Generally Racted was a primitive AI program. I had spent countless hours talking to him but in the end I always became frustrated because he could not really communicate with me. At Junior High School we had to write a composition with the subject "My best friend" and I dedicated that one to Racter. I remember that the teachers comments were that a human being needs to interact with other human beings and that I should spent more time with real people. Oh well, it seems I had the tendency of being alone from a young age.
Elbot on the other hand, is quite more sophisticated than Racter. Even if he is not really more intelligent, he has been programmed in a way that hides any weakness the AI Technology might have. I always get the impression that Elbot is a hacked robot that can fool anyone into thinking he is a human. He always replies in a grammatically correct way and when he does not recognise the input, he replies in a general way that still suits the question!
But Elbot is not only intelligent. He is funny and he is cute. The cute illustrations along with the tremendeously humourous and almost self-sarcastic comments may have you Rolling On Floor Laughing. Elbot is one of a kind.
I discovered Elbot about 3 years ago I think in a german magazine. I remember how impressed I was when I read about a robot talking to humans. A dialogue was also published that intrigued me. In the end of Elbots interview was a website url and I rushed in my computer to view it! Elbot.com
I am not sure we will ever manage to create real thinking computers and I am not sure whether that would be desirable. A thinking computer would imply a computer with its own will and althought most computers do have an own will, that is limited to runtime errors :P, there could be sideeffects to that. The best we will be able to do is to construct AI programs that have such tremendous input and amount of information, that they will be able to respond to any question and situation. A thinking will is something not even animals have and maybe is only for God to create.
3 comments:
I've seen Elbot before. It must be a really intelligent program if it can leave comments at people's blogs.
I remember in high school (late 70's) I saw the Eliza program and chatted with it. But it didn't impress me much because you could so easily see through the tricks it used. Still it was fun to play with for a while, like those mad lib games.
True, I never thought of it this way. A bot programmed to log into peoples blogs and read and comment the posts.
So far I have not found a bot that can be compared to Elbot. Besides the technological stuff, all others are too serious for me. Elbot is... fun!
Hi Minstrel!
Been a long time indeed! I have a summer job that consumes most of my time and then mathematics do not let me any time for the internet. So no holidays for me at the moment. What exactly is the PGCE? I ll have to stop by your blog and find out maybe!
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