Banapana » AI

World in Crisis, Pandora Still Rocks

Russell Warner — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 22:07:25 +0000

With all the bad news lately, I decided it was time to put together an upbeat punk-pop-rock station on Pandora so at least something sounded kind of happy, if not peppy-mad. The thing is, I could think of a few bands I wanted to seed this one with, among them, The Ting Tings and Metric—both good at being mad with an upbeat sound; rebels all. But there was this other band… swedish, I think. I hadn’t listened to them in years and just couldn’t think of the name, even though I knew it was really simple. Well, three songs into listening to my new station who comes up but the Sounds! Wow. The very band I couldn’t recall. Pandora borders on psychic when it does stuff like this. By far the best music web site out there, folks. Tune into my new station and check it out for yourself!

Introducing Powerset

troped — Thu, 15 May 2008 21:49:47 +0000

Despite the fact that “Semantic Web” has been trending down (at least in Google searches), it seems like more web sites devoted to it are popping up these days. I’ve been messing around with Twine for a fews weeks now and it seems pretty useful, although it definitely can’t accomplish what they claim. ¹ A new one that I stumbled into, via KurzweilAI.net is Powerset. My 30 second review is that I tried searches on two pretty obscure subjects that I’ve been reading about lately, the St. Petersburg factor² and kriegsspiel. Basically, I got the same search results at wikipedia, powerset and google—no immediately discernible differences.

A few nice things do stand out about Powerset. The ajaxy integration of content into the search results page is definitely a step up from Google’s fairly wimpy page snippets. This feature alone would make it much easier to peruse results for accuracy and usefulness.³ I’m also impressed with the fact that Powerset appears to be gathering data from Freebase—an important open source database of information that’s a fundamental step towards creating a semantic web.

But if you ask Google and Powerset the question, “What is math?” you get pretty different answers. Google says:

a science (or group of related sciences) dealing with the logic of quantity and shape and arrangement

Powerset says:

MATH is an American Improv/experimental band formed in Woodstock, New York in the mid 90s.

While this may be true, I don’t think it wins the semantic claims any points. True enough, if you ask “What is mathematics?” you get a better answer. But shouldn’t a search engine claiming semantic abilities understand synonyms? Apparently, not yet. But I’ll definitely keep using Powerset and report back as I understand more.

In short, they claim that it can be a replacement for Del.icio.us and your blog and most things social. They don’t apparently understand some important rules about personalization in this regard. ↩
Weirdly, no one, including Google, had any information about this, which seriously makes me question its existence, since I’ve only seen one reference in a book so far! I’ll definitely have to post about it later. ↩
This reminds me, I really wish someone would create a feature that would allow you to eliminate search results from repeated searches. Like, let me save a search and then slowly cull it down to what I think are the relevant results. The data from those individuals who did the culling would surely be useful to the search engines. ↩

IF and AI?

troped — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:12:05 +0000

I took a long sojourn into the history of interactive fiction (IF) with my launching pad being the stunning revelations unearthed by Andy Balo over at waxy in regards to the never-completed Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure sequel. But after reading that, and poking around the archives and playing a few great examples of IF, I started wondering why more hasn’t been done to advance the interface of these games? Why not incoporate more AI?

From what I can gather, all these old text adventure games are mostly written in something called Z-code and generally speaking, the only way to access most of them is through a Java applet on the web or one of several free downloadable interpreters; unfortunately, all of which choose to exactly emulate the old terminal style screens. On large screens, it’s terribly unpleasant to read. So, my first thought was, why hasn’t the interface been updated to take advantage of the slick typography of modern computers? I think people would take more interest in some of the newer, award-winning fiction created, if this were the case.

And the other thing that I found frustrating is that the commands and command structure hasn’t changed the least in 20 years. My Master Shake bot on AIM can do more with regular English than any of these games.¹ Every time I said “look calendar” and the program responded “I don’t know what you mean,” I found myself wondering, why not? In fact, my bot knows a few things about people and places from the Aqua Teen Hunger Force world. I don’t think it’s hard at all to see that interactive fiction could be greatly improved with some simple AI. I’m going to take a shot at an interactive short story using just ALICE. I think with the right variables (and Jquery interface), it will be possible to build a much smarter interactive fiction.

You can see for yourself and talk to him on AIM at mast3rshak3bot. ↩