Fred (chatbot)

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Fred, or FRED, was an early chatbot written by Robby Garner.

Contents

History

The name Fred was initially suggested by Karen Lindsey, and then Robby jokingly came up with an acronym, "Functional Response Emulation Device." [1] Fred has also been implemented as a Java application by Paco Nathan called JFRED Archived 2008-08-24 at the Wayback Machine .

Fred Chatterbot is designed to explore Natural Language communications between people and computer programs. In particular, this is a study of conversation between people and ways that a computer program can learn from other people's conversations to make its own conversations. [2]

Fred used a minimalistic "stimulus-response" approach. It worked by storing a database of statements and their responses, and made its own reply by looking up the input statements made by a user and then rendering the corresponding response from the database. This approach simplified the complexity of the rule base, but required expert coding and editing for modifications.

Fred was a predecessor to Albert One, which Garner used in 1998 and 1999 to win the Loebner Prize. [3]

See also

Related Research Articles

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The Chinese room argument holds that a digital computer executing a program cannot have a "mind", "understanding", or "consciousness", regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave. Philosopher John Searle presented the argument in his paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs", published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1980. Gottfried Leibniz (1714), Anatoly Dneprov (1961), Lawrence Davis (1974) and Ned Block (1978) presented similar arguments. Searle's version has been widely discussed in the years since. The centerpiece of Searle's argument is a thought experiment known as the Chinese room.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ELIZA</span> Early natural language processing computer program

ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed from 1964 to 1967 at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to explore communication between humans and machines, ELIZA simulated conversation by using a pattern matching and substitution methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the program, but had no representation that could be considered really understanding what was being said by either party. Whereas the ELIZA program itself was written (originally) in MAD-SLIP, the pattern matching directives that contained most of its language capability were provided in separate "scripts", represented in a lisp-like representation. The most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated a psychotherapist of the Rogerian school, and used rules, dictated in the script, to respond with non-directional questions to user inputs. As such, ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots and one of the first programs capable of attempting the Turing test.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chatbot</span> Program that simulates conversation

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The Loebner Prize was an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awarded prizes to the computer programs considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The format of the competition was that of a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge simultaneously held textual conversations with a computer program and a human being via computer. Based upon the responses, the judge would attempt to determine which was which.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robby Garner</span> American natural language programmer and software developer

Robby Garner is an American natural language programmer and software developer. He won the 1998 and 1999 Loebner Prize contests with the program called Albert One. He is listed in the 2001 Guinness Book of World Records as having written the "most human" computer program.

Albert One is an artificial intelligence chatbot created by Robby Garner and designed to mimic the way humans make conversations using a multi-faceted approach in natural language programming.

A physical symbol system takes physical patterns (symbols), combining them into structures (expressions) and manipulating them to produce new expressions.

The philosophy of artificial intelligence is a branch of the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of computer science that explores artificial intelligence and its implications for knowledge and understanding of intelligence, ethics, consciousness, epistemology, and free will. Furthermore, the technology is concerned with the creation of artificial animals or artificial people so the discipline is of considerable interest to philosophers. These factors contributed to the emergence of the philosophy of artificial intelligence.

The minimum intelligent signal test, or MIST, is a variation of the Turing test proposed by Chris McKinstry in which only boolean answers may be given to questions. The purpose of such a test is to provide a quantitative statistical measure of humanness, which may subsequently be used to optimize the performance of artificial intelligence systems intended to imitate human responses.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Turing test</span> Test of a machines ability to imitate human intelligence

The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation was a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel, such as a computer keyboard and screen, so the result would not depend on the machine's ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator could not reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine would be said to have passed the test. The test results would not depend on the machine's ability to give correct answers to questions, only on how closely its answers resembled those a human would give. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the verbal version generalizes naturally to all of human performance capacity, verbal as well as nonverbal (robotic).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cleverbot</span> Web application

Cleverbot is a chatterbot web application. It was created by British AI scientist Rollo Carpenter and launched in October 2008. It was preceded by Jabberwacky, a chatbot project that began in 1988 and went online in 1997. In its first decade, Cleverbot held several thousand conversations with Carpenter and his associates. Since launching on the web, the number of conversations held has exceeded 150 million. Besides the web application, Cleverbot is also available as an iOS, Android, and Windows Phone app.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to natural-language processing:

References

  1. Robitron Software Research, Inc. "The Simon Laven Page" Archived 2017-06-18 at the Wayback Machine Robitron History
  2. L. Caputo, R. Garner, P. Nathan. "FRED, Milton and Barry: the evolution of intelligent agents for the Web", Advances in intelligent systems, 1997. portal.acm.org
  3. Søren Gjellerup Christiansen "Techniques applied to pass the Turing Test" Archived 2007-09-14 at the Wayback Machine Master's Thesis