Mike’s Personal Blog

Two things fascinate me in life - Intelligence and Flying.  Though I wasn’t able to pursue my dream of becoming a pilot, no one can stop me from pursuing my fascination with intelligence.  How do we think?  How do we respond?  How do we understand?  How do we learn?  Also, how do other things in nature do the same thing?  Dogs, whales, dolphins, sharks, cats, and even mice.  Though one may argue that only we humans are truly intelligent and that animals are not, I still think that animals display a certain form of intelligence in one way or another.

In my pursuit of understanding intelligence, I decided to take the path of artificial intelligence.  I have no formal education about this nor do I plan to go to school just for this.  Rather, I will take this path out of my own understanding of things - as I always had done in the past.

So, how do I pursue this dream?  This goal?  For now, my best bet would be to create my own chatterbot (or chatbot).  In my search for ‘intelligent’ chatbots, I have found some interesting ones - Alan of www.a-i.com and Jabberwacky of www.jabberwacky.com.  Both appear to show attributes of learning.  The problem with these two chatbots is that they would soon either sound stupid or attempt to divert the conversation to something that it ‘knows’.  Thus far, I haven’t found a chatbot that really knows what it’s talking about.  My goal is to write a chatbot that ‘knows’ what it’s talking about.  Something that would make sense even if you talk to it for hours.  I know this is an ambitious project but so are many other projects out there.

Ok, great!  Now, you may ask, “How do you, Mr. Mike Lopez, plan to do this?”  For now, it’s still a bit vague in my head but here’s a rough ’sketch’ for my chatbot:

Phase 1 - Knowing and Understanding

This can be broken down into three things.

1. Know and understand how we humans process language
2. Know and understand how we humans respond to things that are said to us
3. Know and understand how we humans learn

Phase 2 - Mimicking

Once Phase 1 is completed, it’s time to write my chatbot based on the information gathered from Phase 1.

So far, it’s pretty simple.  Soon, I hope and I believe, this will be much more complex than I used to think.  Until then…