Verbot
Encyclopedia
The Verbot is a popular chatterbot
program and Artificial Intelligence Software Development Kit (SDK) for the Windows platform and for the web.
's work as a graduate student and post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University; and its artistry back to Peter Plantec
's work in personality psychology and art direction.
, Inc., developed a prototype Chatterbot
, Julia, which competed in the internationally known Turing test
, for the coveted Loebner Prize
. The Turing Test matches computer scientist judges against machines to see if they can distinguish a computer from a real human. This prototype version was refined and developed, and in 1997, Dr. Mauldin and Peter Plantec, a clinical psychologist, and animator, formed Virtual Personalities, Inc. (now Conversive, Inc.) in order to create a virtual human interface that would incorporate real-time animation as well as speech and natural language processing. The initial release, a stand-alone virtual person called Sylvie, was beta-tested to the public. This release was well received, and finally, after several versions, the production release (deemed version 3) of the Verbally Enhanced Software Robot—or, Verbot was deployed in the Fall 2000.
, he proceeded to write a program called "PET" for his 8 kilobyte Commodore Pet Computer. PET included simple induction as a way to posit new information, and once managed the following deep observation: Meanwhile, Plantec, was separately designing a personality for "Entity" a theoretical virtual human that would interact comfortably with humans without pretending to be one. At that time the technology was not advanced enough to bring Entity to life. Mauldin was working on that.
Subject: I like my friend
(later)
Subject: I like food.
PET: I have heard that food is your friend.
Mauldin got so involved with this, that he majored in Computer Science and Minored in Linguistics.
, an implementation of Dungeons and Dragons where the player would descend 26 levels in a randomly created dungeon, fighting monsters, gathering treasure, and searching for the elusive "Amulet of Yendor". Mauldin was one of four grad students who devoted a large amount of time to building a program called "Rog-O-Matic
" that could and on several occasions did manage to retrieve the amulet and emerge victorious from the dungeon.
(a descendent of MUD and AberMUD), Mauldin was one of the first to create a computer player that would explore the text-based world of TinyMUD. But his first robot, Gloria, gradually accreted more and more linguistic ability, to the point that it could pass the "unsuspecting" Turing Test. In this version of the test, the human has no reason to suspect that one of the other occupants of the room is controlled by a computer, and so is more polite and asks fewer probing questions. The second generation of Mauldin's TinyMUD robots was Julia, created on Jan. 8, 1990. Julia slowly developed into a more and more capable conversational agent, and assumed useful duties in the TinyMUD world, including tour guide, information assistant, note-taker, message-relayer, and even could play the card game hearts along with the other human players.
In 1991, the first Loebner Prize
contest was held in Boston, Mass., and Julia was there. Although she only finished third, she was ranked by one judge as more human than one of the human confederates, winning a coveted certificate of humanness in the world's first restricted Turing test
.
Julia continued to log into to various TinyMUD's and TinyMucks for the next seven years, and also chats with hundreds of people a month over the internet.
It was therefore only a very short cognitive leap from Julia to Lycos
, another robotic agent that explores a virtual world made of hyperlinked pages of text, and which answers questions about those pages. Sylvie was born and her abilities were expanded greatly to include interfacing with computers and control systems via her serial ports.
As and aside, Plantec noticed that an inordinately large number of Sylvies were being sold in Southeast Asia. Upon investigation he discovered that students had discovered a "test" mode that would allow them to type in English sentences that Sylvie would pronounce in her somewhat stylized English. Sylvie was teaching them English ... her style of English.
Chatterbot
A chatter robot, chatterbot, chatbot, or chat bot is a computer program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods, primarily for engaging in small talk. The primary aim of such simulation has been to fool the user into thinking...
program and Artificial Intelligence Software Development Kit (SDK) for the Windows platform and for the web.
Early Beginning
Virtual Personalities, Inc. traces its technology back to Dr. Michael MauldinMichael Loren Mauldin
Michael Loren "Fuzzy" Mauldin is the founder and chief scientist of the Lycos Internet search engine company. He developed the Lycos Search Engine while working on the Informedia Digital Library project at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also, Director of Conversive, Inc...
's work as a graduate student and post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University; and its artistry back to Peter Plantec
Peter Plantec
Peter Plantec is a writer, digital artist and software designer. His books Virtual Humans and The Caligari trueSpace2 Bible are both five stars at Amazon. As president of Virtual Personalities, Inc., he was responsible for the design and development of Sylvie, the first practical commercial...
's work in personality psychology and art direction.
Historic Outline
In 1994, Dr. Mauldin, Founder of LycosLycos
Lycos, Inc. is a search engine and web portal established in 1994. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, webhosting, social networking, and entertainment websites.-Corporate history:...
, Inc., developed a prototype Chatterbot
Chatterbot
A chatter robot, chatterbot, chatbot, or chat bot is a computer program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods, primarily for engaging in small talk. The primary aim of such simulation has been to fool the user into thinking...
, Julia, which competed in the internationally known Turing test
Turing test
The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. In Turing's original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All...
, for the coveted Loebner Prize
Loebner prize
The Loebner Prize is an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awards prizes to the chatterbot considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The format of the competition is that of a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge simultaneously holds textual conversations...
. The Turing Test matches computer scientist judges against machines to see if they can distinguish a computer from a real human. This prototype version was refined and developed, and in 1997, Dr. Mauldin and Peter Plantec, a clinical psychologist, and animator, formed Virtual Personalities, Inc. (now Conversive, Inc.) in order to create a virtual human interface that would incorporate real-time animation as well as speech and natural language processing. The initial release, a stand-alone virtual person called Sylvie, was beta-tested to the public. This release was well received, and finally, after several versions, the production release (deemed version 3) of the Verbally Enhanced Software Robot—or, Verbot was deployed in the Fall 2000.
- The grandfather of all Verbots is Rog-O-MaticRog-O-MaticRog-O-Matic is a bot developed in 1984 that plays the computer game Rogue.Described as a "belligerent expert system", Rog-O-Matic performs well when tested against expert Rogue players, even winning the game. Because all information in Rogue is communicated to the player via ASCII text, Rog-O-Matic...
, which although it could not talk, could and did explore a virtual world. - Julia has been active on the internet in one form or another since 1989.
- A close cousin of Julia is Lycos, a robot that explores the World Wide Web and answers questions about it.
- Sylvie was the first Verbot with a face and a voice.
- Sylvie was the first Virtual Human with advanced, flexible interfacing capability.
Beginnings
The Virtual Personalities story goes back to 1978, where Mauldin was attending Rice University. Fascinated by the idea of ELIZAELIZA
ELIZA is a computer program and an early example of primitive natural language processing. ELIZA operated by processing users' responses to scripts, the most famous of which was DOCTOR, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist. Using almost no information about human thought or emotion, DOCTOR...
, he proceeded to write a program called "PET" for his 8 kilobyte Commodore Pet Computer. PET included simple induction as a way to posit new information, and once managed the following deep observation: Meanwhile, Plantec, was separately designing a personality for "Entity" a theoretical virtual human that would interact comfortably with humans without pretending to be one. At that time the technology was not advanced enough to bring Entity to life. Mauldin was working on that.
Subject: I like my friend
(later)
Subject: I like food.
PET: I have heard that food is your friend.
Mauldin got so involved with this, that he majored in Computer Science and Minored in Linguistics.
Rogue
In the late seventies and early eighties, a popular computer game at Universities was RogueRogue (computer game)
Rogue is a dungeon crawling video game first developed by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman around 1980. It was a favorite on college Unix systems in the early to mid-1980s, in part due to the procedural generation of game content. Rogue popularized dungeon crawling as a video game trope, leading...
, an implementation of Dungeons and Dragons where the player would descend 26 levels in a randomly created dungeon, fighting monsters, gathering treasure, and searching for the elusive "Amulet of Yendor". Mauldin was one of four grad students who devoted a large amount of time to building a program called "Rog-O-Matic
Rog-O-Matic
Rog-O-Matic is a bot developed in 1984 that plays the computer game Rogue.Described as a "belligerent expert system", Rog-O-Matic performs well when tested against expert Rogue players, even winning the game. Because all information in Rogue is communicated to the player via ASCII text, Rog-O-Matic...
" that could and on several occasions did manage to retrieve the amulet and emerge victorious from the dungeon.
TinyMUD
So when in 1989, James Aspnes at Carnegie Mellon created the first TinyMUDTinyMUD
TinyMUD is the name of a MUD server codebase, and the first MUD running that codebase. The MUD itself has subsequently come to be known as "TinyMUD Classic" or simply "Classic", or occasionally "DaisyMUD"...
(a descendent of MUD and AberMUD), Mauldin was one of the first to create a computer player that would explore the text-based world of TinyMUD. But his first robot, Gloria, gradually accreted more and more linguistic ability, to the point that it could pass the "unsuspecting" Turing Test. In this version of the test, the human has no reason to suspect that one of the other occupants of the room is controlled by a computer, and so is more polite and asks fewer probing questions. The second generation of Mauldin's TinyMUD robots was Julia, created on Jan. 8, 1990. Julia slowly developed into a more and more capable conversational agent, and assumed useful duties in the TinyMUD world, including tour guide, information assistant, note-taker, message-relayer, and even could play the card game hearts along with the other human players.
In 1991, the first Loebner Prize
Loebner prize
The Loebner Prize is an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awards prizes to the chatterbot considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The format of the competition is that of a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge simultaneously holds textual conversations...
contest was held in Boston, Mass., and Julia was there. Although she only finished third, she was ranked by one judge as more human than one of the human confederates, winning a coveted certificate of humanness in the world's first restricted Turing test
Turing test
The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. In Turing's original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All...
.
Julia continued to log into to various TinyMUD's and TinyMucks for the next seven years, and also chats with hundreds of people a month over the internet.
Lycos
Julia's job was to explore a virtual world consisting of pages of textual descriptions, with links between them, and to construct an internal map of that world and answer questions about it (including path information such as the shortest route from one room to another, and matching information, such as which rooms contained a certain kind of object or textual description).It was therefore only a very short cognitive leap from Julia to Lycos
Lycos
Lycos, Inc. is a search engine and web portal established in 1994. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, webhosting, social networking, and entertainment websites.-Corporate history:...
, another robotic agent that explores a virtual world made of hyperlinked pages of text, and which answers questions about those pages. Sylvie was born and her abilities were expanded greatly to include interfacing with computers and control systems via her serial ports.
Sylvie
Sylvie was the first intelligent animated virtual human. She was designed both as a conversation agent and as a virtual human interface that would form a bridge between the two. She became more popular as a conversation agent, but her designers believe she serves as a prototype for future virtual human interface design that will help us all cope with the increasing complexity of technology.As and aside, Plantec noticed that an inordinately large number of Sylvies were being sold in Southeast Asia. Upon investigation he discovered that students had discovered a "test" mode that would allow them to type in English sentences that Sylvie would pronounce in her somewhat stylized English. Sylvie was teaching them English ... her style of English.