Oops, we passed the Turing Test

Humor, Online Life

I was bored last month. I decided that it would be fun to hack up an AI bot to sit on the #haskell IRC channel.

I wanted this bot to be a conversation bot, so I would need some sort of AI engine. I wanted it to be a learning bot, so it could learn from what people have said before. I searched around, and it seems there aren’t many good learning AI engines out there for Linux. I eventually settled on MegaHAL.

I then obtained the logs for the conversation in over the past year, and used it to train the bot.

The result was sometimes hilarous, and often riddled with typos and nonsensical (considering the source, many would say that would be expected).

I started a page of MegaMonad quotes with some of the funnier exchanges.

But here’s the best part: there was a person on the channel that didn’t realize that MegaMonad was a bot! Perhaps we just passed the Turing Test accidentally…

Haskell: My New Favorite Language

Programming

I discovered Haskell not long ago. I even wrote a bit about my initial impressions of it.

This is an amazing language. It’s been a long time since I’ve had this much fun programming. The Haskell community is also great; there are more geniuses there than anywhere I’ve seen before.

If you’re new to Haskell, try reading Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming, 2nd Ed.. Or, if you want something online, try Yet Another Haskell Tutorial.

What Are We Fighting For?

Uncategorized

I just watched Unconstitutional. It ended with this question: what are we fighting for?

Most people would say we are fighting for our freedom. That would include our freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom from the government detaining us for no reason, freedom from our government using their power to steal our property.

Yet our response to attacks on us is to turn around and restrict many of those things we say we’re fighting for. People who are Muslims in this country have been beaten in American Federal prisons, held for nearly a year with no charges filed. People who are exercising their right to protest find themselves under FBI scrutiny.

For those of you that have not yet seen Unconstitutional, you should see it. If you are thinking it is like Fahrenheit 9/11, think again. This is not a stick-a-microphone-in-a-politician’s-face-to-make-him-look-stupid movie. This is a movie loaded with first-person interviews and actual footage of events. They interviewed a Muslim family fleeing oppression in Syria who had three family members held in terrible conditions — in Seattle — after 9/11. They showed footage of a Washington, D.C. police unit infiltrating a peaceful protest during Bush’s inauguration. The parallels to the Japanese internment camps years ago are startling.

This is something we should all be MAD about.