[FRIAM] Free Willy in the Atlantic

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

Excellent!   I remember your book, and I think I remember reading about
MegaHAL when you might have shared these details when last this
discussion came up.

I was impressed when first I met some researchers who were doing things
as simple as N-gram analysis in the early 90s and then maybe 10 years
ago I started noticing chatterbots participating in fora with an opaque
enough style as to get away with effectively trolling some of the more
naive members of those fora.  As the  Wikipedia article describes MegHAL
as being "primitive" and "old technology" I suspect that if it were
harnessed up to the list in realtime it might provide a credible
facsimile of some of our posts/threads, maybe most likely my own which
have been described as  "dookie splatter" and what I think lead 
Strangelove to caricature me as "Smithereens - flies off in all
directions at once"

Your self-discipline in keeping MegHALs output "caricaturing" some of us
here to yourself is admirable.   I think some of us would find it
entertaining to "stare into a funhouse mirror at ourselves" but such
things are usually less painful in private than in front of a crowd!   
Such might be tolerable without overt identification of the
participants.   If we couldn't recognize ourselves in the chatterbots'
chatter, I'd be surprised.   Fiction writers often claim that even when
they work hard to avoid using anyone they know as prototypes for their
characters or scenes, they still get an uproar from friends and family
who are just sure they are one character or another. 

"Your opinion of me is none of my business" would apply even to
chatterbots I suppose...

- Steve


> Yep. I used MegaHAL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaHAL
> And I used a blurb from it on the back cover of the book I "wrote" with this: https://thatsmathematics.com/mathgen/
>
> I showed you that book when you visited one time. FWIW, I also generated MegaHAL databases for several of the most frequent posters to FriAM. But I figured it would be disrespectful and ethically problematic to post any of the output from those.
>
> Unfortunately, I lost all those databases at some point. I'm just not as rigorous as I used to be. They're probably in my safe on one of the disks. But who knows? And it's irrelevant anyway. What's more relevant are the conversing chatbots we wrote for an art instillation in Norway. They were trained up as different personalities working in a mill, designed to both have conversations with each other *and* answer questions from visiting children. That was a fun project.
>
> On 4/3/21 6:44 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> I also think Glen has claimed that  he did build (or just train up) some kind of existing babble-generator on his own text for his own entertainment.