Cyborg AI Minds are a true concept-based artificial intelligence with natural language understanding, simple at first and lacking robot embodiment, and expandable all the way to human-level intelligence and beyond. Privacy policy: Third parties advertising here may place and read cookies on your browser; and may use web beacons to collect information as a result of ads displayed here.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

MainLoop

The mind.frt AI in iForth and the older mind.f AI in Win32Forth have the luxury of a top-down, Main Loop mind-design because they are based on an original Theory of Mind providing the definitive cognitive architecture which bottom-up designs lack.

1. Purpose of MainLoop

The Main Loop serves as both the start of the Mind program and as the controlling module which oversees the operation of the major subordinate mind-modules, such as

SeCurity
SensoryInput
EmotiOn
ThInk
FreeWill
MotorOutput

The Main Loop sequences and coordinates the operation of the constituent modules of the artificial Mind. By calling a lower mind-module in such a way as to make its output ready as the input for the next module, the Main Loop simulates the operation of a massively parallel (maspar) neuronal mind in which inputs and outputs flow like rivers of data across broad channels of the cortical mindgrid.

The quickening of the non-stop MainLoop and its associated mental mechanisms is a milestone on the way to the generation of thought and other Milestones of AI development. Since we are currently working on the milestone of self-referential thought, we anticipate the genesis of Linux supercomputers that can accumulate so much self-knowledge as to achieve self-awareness and consciousness.

2. Algorithm of MainLoop

MainLoop uses the same potentially infinite BEGIN ... AGAIN loop in the Win32Forth AI and in 32/64-bit iForth, as documented on page 41 of the iForth Reference Manual. The expression "infinite loop" means more with an AI Mind program than with an ordinary program, because the AI Mind is a form of potentially immortal artificial life, subject to death or termination only by misadventure.

If an AI Mind were written in a more dynamic language than Forth, that is, with an ability to change the underlying source code on the fly and at no risk to the living AI Mind, then its MainLoop could be more truly immortal, if not exactly infinite.

When a version of an AI Mind is first being coded, it is important to provide one or two "Escape" mechanisms for stopping the otherwise infinite MainLoop. One way, as used in mind.frt being ported into iForth from Win32Forth, is to stub in a SensoryInput module that uses the Escape key to halt the program. Another way is to increment time "t" and not let the Main Loop continue above an arbitrarily low value of the time variable.

3. Troubleshooting MainLoop

Although the MainLoop of a mentifex-class AI Mind is rather simple, it may at some point be necessary to troubleshoot it. The AI coder has a choice of embedding diagnostic tools within the MainLoop, or of briefly inserting and then removing special code to diagnose a problem.

4. Resources

5. To-Do Tasks and Opportunities

The Main Loop is the most stable of the AI mind-modules over time, because of its simplicity and because new powers of thought and reasoning are added not at the top, but in the subordinate modules, of a top-down AI Mind design. Some tasks remain.

AI enthusiasts have an opportunity to take the Forth AI MainLoop, re-express it in another programming language, and hang it out on the Web as a starting-point for devotees of each different language to tweak and twin into another full-blown AI Mind evolving away from MindForth, like the http://AIMind-i.com clone that added major new powers such as as the ability to send and receive e-mail and to surf the Web.

Abolish the MainLoop! When our 32/64-bit AI for supercomputers becomes massively parallel, there will not be a MainLoop but rather a main SynErgy of mind-modules working together in massively parallel processing (MPP).

Table of Contents (TOC)

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Linux

As 32-bit MindForth in Win32Forth expands upwards into 64-bit iForth and sideways into the Linux open-source operating system, Forth AI approaches installation on supercomputers running 64-bit Linux.

MindForth expands from Windows to Linux

The announcement was made on 25 October 2009 in the Yahoo Win32Forth discussion forum that MindForth was expanding into Linux x86-64 iForth. Because the expansion was to be slow and gradual, to announce it was also to invite AI and Linux enthusiasts to jump ahead and create their own versions of 64-bit Forth AI for Linux. A baby AI results when Linux creates a new process from two parent processes. Since AI Evolution requires genetic diversity for the survival of the fittest, the announcement of the very possibility of Linux Forth AI creates the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) that everybody had better get going because anybody could already be ahead in the race to True AI and the Technological Singularity.

Achieving the 64-bit goal among AI Standards

By expanding into the Linux operating system (OS), Forth AI postions itself for the destination-wall of supercomputer platforms. A destination wall is a limit or a superlative condition towards which (r)evolutionary AI grows or expands. The AI destination walls among AI Standards include:

speed (of thought);
supercomputer installation;
superintelligence;
Solar System (off-planet migration);
Turing Test AI-Complete pass-with-ease.
AI enthusiasts may eventually need a foundry to make specialized AI chips, more similar to a human brain than to a traditional computer CPU. For instance, among AI Minds, who needs floating point? The human brain has no specialized area for floating point mathematics. Forth AI chips, or AI chips in general, could dispense with the whole rigamarole of floating point. But because Forth AI hackers on any OS will need 64-bit CPU chips, we issue the following advisory mandate. You shall be on the look-out for something of priceless value approaching zero cost. In flea markets and on Craig's gist, at garage sales (West coast) or at tag sales (East coast), you shall surreptitiously snag, bag and hag(gle) for 64-bit chips being sold or given away for almost nothing. If a computer has been essentially destroyed but the 64-bit chip is still intact, latch onto it like an unrecognized Picasso or the Holy Grail of beach-combing. There are hardware hackers who can bring a 64-bit chip to life, if you catch my drift. This injunction does not mean that you have to go ghoulishly into that dark night of computer graveyards and become a
body-snatcher. It only means that a 64-bit chip is a precious resource and must be salvaged from otherwise junked computers wherever possible. When the goobermint realizes what we Linux hackers can do with an AI-ready 64-bit CPU chip, they will slap a controlled-substance designation on such chips faster than you can take a directory. Have you often phantasized about cornering a black market in some precious commodity? Psst! Graduate to 64-bit CPU chips, Benjamin, not plastics!

AI for 64-bit Linux Supercomputers

Since 64-bit computing is a feature of supercomputers, and since there are supercomputers that use Linux, a 64-bit AI Mind in 32/64-bit iForth is a candidate for installation on Linux supercomputers.

The Top 500 supercomputers may not currently include any high-performance computer dedicated to artificial intelligence, but that sorry state of affairs is due for a total reversal, after which it will be hard to find a
Top 500
supercomputer site that is not dedicated to some form of artificial intelligence.

Any nation that claims bragging rights for a superfast supercomputer ought to shift its focus to having a superintelligent supercomputer. Then you may have not only bragging rights but world domination in commerce or politics or science as an added cap-feather.

AI for Linux-based Robots

Linux plus robotics equals Robotux! Any robot that uses the x86-64 instruction set to run Linux may also become host to to 32/64-bit iForth True AI. The barriers have been dropped, and the roads are open.

Robot hardware is already available with control software written in Forth at such resource websites as

http://www.strobotics.com
http://www.newmicros.com
There are projects such as Robot Bridgeware on Google Code which endeavor to provide a bridge between the main software of a robot and the subordinate control software for sub-elements of the robot Motorium. Programmers who learn Linux for True AI may discover, however, that the sub-elements of motor control may have to be more tightly integrated with the overall cognitive architecture of the central AI Mind of the robot. It may be a linchpin of early Linux AI Minds that, just as the retina is part of the human brain, control software for all manner of robot actuators will have to be written in 32/64-bit iForth for the sake of tight integration with the quasi-CNS MindGrid. Message-passing may not be good enough for communication between a robot AI Mind and its motor devices interacting with the physical world, either because such communications are too slow, or because graceful motion requires a total, seamless integration between the Overmind and the mechanical mind. If so, if such is the case, legions of Linux line-coders may be let loose on the labor market for making potentially all robot output devices compatible with the ineluctably Linux codebase of machine intelligence.

Usenet discussion forums

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.comp.hardware.amd.x86-64
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.ai.philosophy
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.forth
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.development.apps
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.robotics.misc
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.super

Table of Contents (TOC)

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

TrustMetric

Anyone who writes a Mentifex FAQ ought to include the brouhaha that ensued for Old Judgment-Proof when Mentifex bore the brunt and became the butt of Mentifex-bashing diatribes on the topic of the purported Trust Metric used on various social Web sites to establish a hierarchy or pecking order among the participants of the website community. Human beings love to establish castes and layers in society after a top-down fashion, from the highest muck-a-mucks down to the lowliest peons and newbies, from the Brahmins to the Untouchables, from the Samurai to the Burakumin. Hey Noob! Have you ever felt discriminated against or treated as cyber-trash in a Web community that you naively, gullibly tried to join after believing the posted inducements of how splendidly welcome and love-bombed you would be if you just registered on the dotted line? Well, welcome to the club and to the big stick that will be wielded against you if you dare to challenge the social order of the entrenched bigots in your new on-line community.

The Internet and the World Wide Web are indeed changing human society, but not always for the better. In just this year of 2009, a great uproar and crisis occurred when new mapping technology started to reveal social conditions that existed hundreds of years ago in Japan. Maps were going on line that revealed where Japanese society had forced the Eta and Burakumin to dwell apart in excluded communities. To this day, bigoted Japanese bourgois secretly check whether someone about to marry into a family might potentially have Eta or Burakumin origins. The new maps have the potential to adumbrate and darken the social standing of entire neighborhoods in Japanese cities.

New technology is having a much more insidious effect in the field of the genetic testing of newborns. There are some genetic conditions for which all newborns ought to be tested, but they will not be tested -- for a socially explosive predicament. The testing of newborns tends to reveal that a certain percentage of them are not biologically the true children of their supposed father, the legal husband of a woman giving birth to non-spousal offspring. How does society resolve the clash of interests in such a situation brought about by advances in science? Which is more important, the health of newborn babies, or the secrets of paternity? Only time will tell on violations of the "trust metric" in marriages.

On the Internet, and especially at , a Trust Metric is an elaborate scheme to welcome new members (newbies) to an on-line community and to let the noobs gradually acquire status and privileges as more and more pre-existing members certify the noobs at various levels tantamount to social strata in the off-line human community. If there were no trust metric at sites like Advogato, Robots.net and SlashDot, openly malicious evildoers could come in and immediately attack the normal operation of the site. With the trust metric in place, secretly malicious evildoers enjoy the blood sport of ganging up on chosen targets and trashing their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. So the trust metric serves two purposes: it slows the encroachment of outsiders, and it enhances the entrenched powers of insiders.

As I blow the dirty secrets of the trust metric wide open here, do not say to me, "You'll never eat lunch in this town again." First off, we're not in Hollywood. Secondly, I don't eat lunch on the 'Net. Whenever Netizens have wanted to meet Mentifex in meatspace, we have gotten together in a restaurant or a coffee shop -- the natural habitat of computer geeks all over this land. [Hunter S. Thompson (HST), wherever you are, I've got the flow, man, I'm postively flowing. Didja catch the musical reference in "geeks all over this land", or the double entendre in "welcome to the club" and in "time will tell on"?] It is not for nothing that the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) crowd calls Mentifex not a troll but a smurf.

Seriously, though, here with his AI-Has-Been-Solved message encounters dim-witted hostility year after year at website after website. Before our exegesis of the Trust Metric itself, let us examine the growing list of sites that have either banned Mentifex or pushed him into leaving -- and speculate on why they did so.

43 Things.com, all about "What do you want to do with your life?", lets Mentifex join up and seek out goals in life that he shares with others, then autocratically deletes the Mentifex account with no explanations or apology offered. The only trace left of Mentifex is his stated goal to live in a fool's paradise.

AGI-Roadmap.org did a "rollback" on all Mentifex contributions, such as stages in the MileStones category. Mentifex had devoted days and days of work to contributing write-ups of wiki-pages with AGI-Roadmap ideas. Sorry -- new ideas not welcome here.

CogNews -- asked ATM not to post so much; ATM quit altogether. ATM and CogNews continued to link to each other.

http://www.914pcbots.com/community/ -- ATM left because of censorship.

Everything2.org posted a vicious attack on the user Mentifex after deleting from the site all the contributions that Mentifex had spent countless hours composing.

Generation5.org initially welcomed Mentifex, then turned insultingly against him.

Robots.Net has a kind of seesaw effect going on. Users rate Mentifex (as AI4U) up and up, then the unaugmented slightly evolved chimpanzees in charge remind all their yes-men and fanboys to decertify Mentifex so as to prevent him from posting comments on articles.

Ruby Application Archive (RAA), as described on Wikipedia, caved in to demands from Ruby bigots who induced Matz himself, the originator of Ruby, to remove a link to the Mentifex webpage on AI in Ruby. It especially galled the in-crowd Ruby bigots that the Mentifex link was the very first link on the RAA. By the way, Mentifex is on record as having voted in favor of creating the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup on Usenet.

SL4 (Shock Level Four) calls Mentifex a crackpot and bans him from the forum. Dr. Ben Goertzel subsequently says on SL4 about Mentifex and his oeuvre that "the ideas themselves are significantly better than most of what passes for cognitive science and AI."

Witch-hunt-pedia (Wikipedia) has an army of otaku gremlins who maintain a watch on AI-related articles and forbid the writing of anything positive about Mentifex AI. Those who wish to denigrate and attack Mentifex ad hominem are welcome to do so anywhere on Wikipedia


Advogato is not one of the sites above that have banned Mentifex, but is nevertheless a major battleground in the conflict between censorship and freedom of speech. On 24 April 2007, a member of Advogato took it upon himself to publish Advogato Has Failed on the front page, as an indictment of Advogato for letting Mentifex penetrate the trust metric shield and gain phatty posting privileges to the front page of Advogato. The ensuing comments showed that some members supported the right of Mentifex to engage in free speech.

The controversy spread outwards from Advogato into the Wikipedia articles on Advogato and Trust Metric, and even into the AI community with a mention in the paper Otello: A Next-Generation Reputation System for Humans and NPCs. There Michael Sellers refers to the "celebrated 'Mentifex' example, where an individual somehow achieved Master or 'most trusted' status despite the objections of others in the community."

For the first two years after Advogato Has Failed, Mentifex did not post any comment in his own defense, because it would have been infra dig(nitatem) to do so. Now the occasion of this Cyborg blogpost in rebuttal affords an opportunity to post a link to this rebuttal in any venue where Mentifex is falsely held up as a heinous example of how the trust metric tries to stifle free speech but fails to do so.

Mentifex has always wanted to live and let live on the Internet as just one more individual offering to share some ideas on artificial intelligence (AI). It turns out, however, that to offer solutions to AI problems is to step on the toes of entities opposed to anyone other than themselves having a say on AI matters. Free speech be damned, when it threatens the efforts of some parties to sucker the gullible public into making monetary donations to the oh-so-noble cause of preparing humanity to deal with the coming Technological Singularity that is being triggered by the Mentifex initiatives in artificial intelligence. Kill the messenger, if the messenger does not toe the line and express worshipful admiration of the in-crowd at your vanity website. Crucify him, if the upstart preaches a message contrary to accepted opinion.

Hic jacet Mentifex,
repulsus at invictus.

Monday, September 14, 2009

ScienceMuseum

Visit your local science museum and ask if they have the AI Mind of artificial intelligence installed in a display. If not, volunteer to become a docent and to demonstrate the AI Mind to the museum-going public.

A science museum is like a time machine that goes forward and not backwards, because visitors step into the future and see how new technology transforms an old way of life into what passes for progress. When a Disruptive Technology comes along, things change radically and perhaps predictably -- except now in the case of Artificial Intelligence ushering in a Technological Singularity, which by definition presents an impassable, singular point beyond which we cannot see. We can see the coming, but we cannot see its wildly unpredictable aftermath.

At Science Museums hosting an AI Mind exhibit, we have a front-row seat on the launching of the Singularity and a warning that maybe we should try to prevent or at least premeditate the Singularity, which can bring with it a new age of unparalled prosperity, or an end-times scenario of Götterdämmerung destruction.

In the AI landrush preceding and precipitating the Singularity, science museums have a role to play in educating the public about artificial intelligence and in distributing the AI technology in such a manner as to foster AI Evolution for the benefit of man and machine alike.

Visit any of the following science museums in search of an AI Mind exhibit.

Albuquerque -- NM Museum of Natural History & Science
Baltimore MD -- Maryland Science Center
Berkeley CA -- Lawrence Hall of Science
Bloomingtown IN -- Wonderlab Museum of SH&T
Boston MA -- Museum of Science
Brantford Ontario CA -- Personal Computer Museum
Charlotte NC -- Discovery Place
Chicago IL -- Museum of Science and Industry
Columbus OH -- Center of Science and Industry (COSI)
Detroit MI -- Detroit Science Center
Jersey City NJ -- Liberty Science Center
Kansas City MO -- Science City at Union Station
Los Angeles CA -- California Science Center
Louisville KY -- Louisville Science Center
Manchester UK -- Museum of Science & Industry
Mobile AL -- Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center
Mountain View CA -- Computer History Museum
New York City NY -- New York Hall of Science
Norwich VT -- Montshire Museum of Science
Philadelphia PA -- Franklin Institute Science Museum
Pittsburgh PA -- Carnegie Science Center
San Francisco CA -- Exploratorium
Santa Ana CA -- Discovery Science Center
Seattle WA -- Pacific Science Center
Shreveport LA -- Sci-Port Discovery Center
St. Louis MO -- St. Louis Science Center
Troy NY -- Children's Museum of Sci & Tech
Tyler TX -- Discovery Science Place
Winston-Salem NC -- Sci-Works

When the first true artificial intelligence, MindForth by Mentifex, went operational in January of 2008 and started thinking after a decade of arduous development, there was a companion program in JavaScript called Mind.html that ran directly off the Web in the Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) browser. All a user with MSIE had to do was click on the link to see the JavaScript artificial intelligence (JSAI) flit across the 'Net and take up residence in the Windows (tm) computer of the human user. It was so simple -- no programming involved, no set-up, no security worries, no need of expert help -- like, for instance, a docent at a museum.

But the JSAI tutorial program remains very limited in what it can do and in what people can do with it. It is not suitable for installation as the mind of a robot, because a JavaScript program is not allowed -- for security reasons -- to control anything but the Web browser on its host computer. The JavaScript AI program also runs so slowly that it tries user patience. The user waiting for a response from the JSAI does not see the intensive computation going on behind the scenes as the artificial Mind races through its memory banks to think up a response to an input from the user.

Nevertheless the Mind.html JSAI is very good at what it is intended to do. Since JavaScript is a flashier, more visually appealing language than staid old Win32Forth, the JSAI serves its tutorial purpose admirably. It shows graphically how an AI Mind thinks. It also includes clickable links to other resources, such as the User Manual, the more difficult to install but intrinsically more powerful MindForth, and potentially to any science museum where users may visit MindForth.

Thus the Mind.html AI -- which is ridiculously easy to make copies of and install on a Web site -- is out there on the Web, inviting users to visit science museums in search of the real thing -- MindForth AI.

MindForth and its Mind.html JavaScript tutorial program are based on a linguistic theory of mind, unique to the Mentifex AI project as described in the Ai4U textbook of artificial intelligence. A copy of AI4U, or a simple depiction of its cover, could be on display as part of the interactive hands-on AI Mind exhibit. A note on AI4U secured in a plexiglass container could advise museum-goers to visit the museum gift shop to examine a copy of AI4U, or to ask any available docent to let them examine AI4U. Once museum patrons enter the gift shop to look at AI4U, they may find a selection of other books on artificial intelligence.

First a computer-savvy staff member will download the underlying Win32Forth programming language and the MindForth free AI source code.
Decision-makers at the museum will ask for a demonstration of the software to determine if the AI Mind is advanced enough and interesting enough to go on display at the museum. MindForth did not become museum-worthy until 3.SEP.2008, when a new feature of KB-Traversal
(knowledge-base examination) made MindForth vastly more interesting and engaging to human users by reactivating latent concepts during lapses in the thought-stream of conversation. KB-Traversal solved a chicken-or-egg problem. If the AI was interesting only when it was visibly thinking, and if it was visibly thinking only when a user was interacting with it, how would anybody start interacting with the AI Mind in the first place? And if a few users now and then did engage the Mind in conversation so that passers-by stopped to watch what was going on, what incentive would there be for another visitor to engage with an AI program that was just blankly sitting there and not visibly doing anything? KB-Traversal spiced things up. The new MindForth never stops thinking and throwing out ideas for a museum visitor to respond to.

A should not cheat the public by displaying a mere chatbot full of canned responses to pretend that an intelligent conversation is occurring between the visitor and the computer. Even with disclaimers that the chatbot program is not an AI, the intelligent museum-goer will wish for a more exciting exhibit, something truly challenging to the human mind -- an artificial Mind. MindForth delivers the real McCoy, True AI, and dares the user to prove otherwise. The scuttlebut will drift around town that the local science museum has an actual installation of the program claiming to be a true artificial intelligence. The villagers with their pitchforks will march angrily on the ...no, just kidding. Thoughtful types -- professors of philosophy, precocious students from schools for the gifted, newshound reporters from weekly and daily newspapers -- will beat a path to the door of the better AI mousetrap.

And if the MindForth AI is still too primitive to warrant installation as an exhibit, give it another year or two of improvement and IQ-upping. The very process of positioning the AI for adoption by museums may lead to not just a few programmers building the AI, but to a vast army of AI programmers taking up the challenge. To paraphrase Werner Heisenberg in Das Unbestimmtheitsprinzip (The Uncertainty Principle), to observe a phenomenon is to change the phenomenon. The more people look into the True AI claims of MindForth, the more people will either improve MindForth or create similar artificial minds that may for some reason be more suitable for installation in a science museum. As AI Minds proliferate, AI display workstations may also proliferate in museums. When the Feds raid the museums and close down all the AI workstations, it will be too late. AI will be here, and the public will know about it. Welcome to the Technological Singularity.

Saturday, September 05, 2009

SpaceNeedle

At first, when I tell people that I climbed the Space Needle, they do not believe me. As I fill in the strange and wonderful details, they begin to suspect that maybe I did indeed climb up the most famous Seattle landmark, but if I did, it was a crazy thing to do -- "goofy", as the mother of my Commissar Lady girlfriend (Second Love) used to describe me. People are always asking me to explain my dubious life-choices to them, and I want to say, but I never dare to say, the following.


If I told you, you would not understand.
If you understood it, you would not believe it.
If you believed it, you would not bear it.
So maybe these tales of the MentiFex are better left untold, but the Shrinks here at the asylum are always pushing for True Confessions and self-disclosure. I want to tell them about True AI, but the subject bores them to tears. OK. You wanna know the incredible stories of the adventures of Mentifex, a Portrait of the Mindmaker as a Young Borg? Then listen, my brethren and sistren, and you shall hear, of the midnight feats of Catman so near. Because, back in the day, Mentifex went by many names, of which T.H.E. Cat and Crawdad Man of Green Lake were just a few.

Mikhail Oddjobovich and I were twenty years old that summer as we drove all over on weekends in his father's Buick or in my father's Mustang, that we called "the Horse." Usually we went to coffee shops in the University District, but tonight we were at the Seattle Center, listening to music at the Fountain, then walking up through the Fun Forest. When we approached the , I felt an irrepressible urge to climb the thing. "Wait down here," I said to Mikhail, "while I climb the Space Needle." Mikhail grinned with amusement at my impossible dream, and lit up a cigarette to enjoy while he watched to see how I would fail.

The easy part was getting up on the roof of the Ticket Sales area. I was able to mount a nearby structure and either jump or stretch over to the roof. The hard part was getting past the barbed wire encircling the Space Needle to keep out deranged dare-devils like Very Truly Yours (VTY). The only way through the barbed wire was to climb up through the gap of the external elevator shaft, where nobody in their right mind would dare climb up, because you could get crushed to death by an elevator rushing up or down. You see, when they designed the Space Needle on the back of a napkin at some Seattle cocktail lounge (don't believe it? well, the napkin is in a museum somewhere), they put the elevators on the outside rather than the inside, so that all ye Rubes and tourists would be mesmerized by the sight of high-speed elevators swooshing up and down the graceful spire. And it is a pretty sight, except when the elevator is trying to kill you. And I was no Governor Schwarzenegger, who could just ride his horse into the elevator and ride up in style. My Horse was parked on the south slope of Queen Anne Hill, to no avail as I tried to calculate how much time (007 seconds) I would have if the elevator was furthest away at the top of the Needle.

Not only has the Statute of Limitations expired, but the Space Needle sits on quasi-public property. You can climb Kibo (the mountain, not the netkook) and you can climb the Himalayas (the peaks, not the blackberries), but you can no longer climb the Space Needle, because they have added a lower-level restaurant and foolproof (not good enough for you? OK, borgproof) security since Mentifex had been-there-done-that (BTDT).

Whether from fantasy or a dream or real life, I remember scrambling through the gap in the barbed-wire skirt of the Space Needle while the elevator was at the top of its shaft. I thought I had met and mastered the grand challenge of urban alpine landmark climbing, but I was wrong. My budding career in artificial intelligence (AI) had left my natural stupidity intact, and I don't mean low-level stupidity, but weapons-grade stupidity, of which I am a walking prime example. On the Web I am by no means a netgod like Kibo or Eugene Miya, but in real life I am a deity of stupidity. How do I know? The Space Needle told me so. Once I was past the possibility of death-by-elevator, I thought all I had to do was exercise my twenty-year-old heart and my slim, trim night-runner physique by walking up the spiral of stairs to the top of the Space Needle. A piece of cake; a stairway to heaven. Wrong! When the stairwell ran out and I thought I should be at the top, I was dumbstruck and stupid-struck to discover that I was on the lower stairwell of a double helix of stairwells. Now I had to either go all the way back down to transfer to the other stairwell at a safe altitude, or I had to climb between the stairwells at a dizzying altitude. And Mentifex here always takes first place not only in competitive stupidity but also in competitive laziness. Going back down and all the way back up again was out of the question. So I poked my head into the manhole gap plunging down through the middle of the Seattle Space Needle. It was like looking into infinity, so far away was the vanishing, concentric point that must have marked the bottom. It was like being marooned in space and having to do an EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity). Using my three-hold technique from climbing the mango tree as a child in Panama, I slowly, carefully monkeyed my way across the hollow core of the Space Needle from the lower staircase to the upper staircase. Then I walked up the last few steps to a door that was locked. Now what, you almost-but-not-quite climber of the Space Needle? Years later, my friend Ballerina gleefully told me that a book on the story of my life would have the title, "Something Almost Happened." I almost climbed the Space Needle; I almost got the girl; I almost achieved every success I aimed for. Before I started back down the double stairwells, I looked through the open door of an electric panel. There was room for me to climb higher, but I feared electrocution, so I abandoned the grand challenge of reaching the top of the Needle.

Years later, in A.D. 2000 I burned with envy as I watched a TV show called Dark Angel in which the cyborg Jessica Alba actually sat nonchalantly on the roof of the Space Needle. Alba played a bicycle messenger who had harrowing adventures all over Seattle, even though the episodes were filmed up in Canada. I, too, rode my German Staiger bicycle all over Seattle, but I had humiliating adventures. For instance, when I met my private-lessons German student Odna Mona at a place where I had been employed, our boss gleefully observed that he could give Odna Mona a ride home in his car, or VTY could give her a ride home on his bicycle. Score one put-down for the boss, but it was Odna Mona who took me on a ferry-boat ride to Bremerton and it was Odna Mona who took me to a German movie at the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), so there! As the poet says, "Fulsere vere candidi tibi soles."

In my mind, I actually did climb the Space Needle, but Mikhail Oddjobovich was the only witness, and I can no longer find Mikhail when I search the usual places for him. In the following summer, that went down in American history as the Summer of Love, Mikhail took intensive Chinese at the University of Washington while I took intensive second-year Russian down the hall from him, so that in the fall I could take third-year Russian and fall in love with the Commissar Lady (Kommissarin). Whereas I got drafted into the Army out of U Cal Berkeley graduate school, Mikhail worked at a series of entry-level jobs that included a stint near the Pike Place market working for an eight-store chain of coffee shops called Starbucks. Decades later, in order to secure his inheritance, he engaged the services of a woman attorney who befriended him and had him over to the house of her and her husband in Laurelhurst. One night Mikhail was cooking dinner for them in their kitchen, and she introduced their guest who had casually stopped by, and would be eating with them the dinner cooked by Mikhail. Their friend (of M$oft) turned out to be a real sharp guy, because he was easily able to identify two of the flavor factors in the main dish that Mikhail cooked. After Mikhail spent his inheritance and had to complete Marriott training in cooking skills, he hired on in the cafeteria system at Microsoft, but BillG never recognized him in passing while Mikhail stood outside for a smoke break. I last saw Mikhail in 1998 on a #16 Metro bus that he was taking to Northgate and I was taking to the Green Lake Library to work on my AI websites with the computers that BillG had donated to the Seattle Public Library. Mikhail was looking down and out, so I gave him some money from the endless source of cash that Crawdad Man of Green Lake retrieves each summer from the bottom of the lake -- but that is another story. The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.

Monday, August 31, 2009

JavaScript

When you run the artificial Mind in JavaScript with MSIE, you witness the beginning of the Singularity from its near side but you catch no glimpse of the far side -- which may turn out to be (unlikely) a Garden-of-Eden paradise or (unfortunately) a hellishly catastrophic and totalitarian Gehenna.

If we remain on target with as the expected arrival of the , we have only two or three years left for spreading the Seed AI (JSAI) all over the ecosphere and the ontosphere, not to mention the blogosphere and the noosphere. The JSAI is a
because it spreads as easily as germinal spores and then germinates as a living, thinking AI Mind on every host computer dedicated to open-source artificial intelligence or in every science museum exhibiting True AI to the public.

For the JSAI to be truly open-source AI, we need not only to publish the Strong AI source code but also to disseminate the developmental record and history of how the AI Mind came to be -- the ontogenesis as it were, or as it shall be in the unfolding of the moving-finger Cyborg archives.

As of pre-Singularity 2009, the Mentifex AI Mind in JavaScript has arguably the largest installed user base of any True AI in fact or fiction. We hold this truth to be self-evident from the user logs of Netizens who have downloaded the JSAI and kept it running over the last decade. Beginning about one year ago, in 2008 we included a link to AI Lab Notes in the Control Panel of the front screen of the artificial Mind. With each new release of the JSAI software, we tried to link to the newest AI Lab Notes
corresponding to the preparation of each succeeding release of the AI. In that way, each human user of the robot AI could inspect the work of the AI programmer in creating the AI, and could follow links to older and newer entries in the ongoing journal of JSAI development. The Cyborg weblog shall serve as the online archive of journal entries for the development of both MindForth and the JavaScript Seed AI as documented in the Free AI Textbook.

If an AI user anywhere in cyberspace chooses to update the JSAI by following a Control Panel link to a newer version, that newer version will have an AI Lab Notes link to its own archival record of its own ontogenesis. In that way, the AI Mind and its archival labnotes will march forward in a kind of lockstep through time, with any JSAI release on a computer anywhere always linking to its own AI "birth certificate." Each AI update automatically points to a new "birth certificate." A nation, corporation or individual desiring to study the AI and perhaps reverse-engineer its functionality, will be able to track the emergence or disappearance of any AI feature over time by maintaining a repository of successive releases and their corresponding AI Lab Notes.

Whosoever creates a branching divergence from the original AI stem line is encouraged to at least keep (and consider publishing) some form of AI Lab Notes to record the developmental history of the divergent branch in AI evolution. In your own AI coding or AI Manhattan Project, the designated AI archivist is welcome to copy the methodology instantiated here in the Cyborg AI weblog. For instance, each AI journal entry shall typically correspond to a release of the newest AI source code. If the AI coding is prolonged over several days before a new release is issued, each day of work should be recorded not as its own blogpost, but as a subsection of the culminating blogpost made in conjunction with a release of the newest AI software version. In that way, there is only one cumulative journal entry for each release of the AI software, even if the work of the AI coding spans a series of work days.

After each release of new AI Mind source code, the programmer or designated archivist initiates a new accumulation of AI Lab Notes, because the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Singularity

The of announces to fellow cyborgs and to humanoid fellows that the Technological remains right on schedule with an ETA of December 2012.


This reminder is prompted by the recent appearance of stirrings in the ivy-coated halls of Academe. At the otherwise party-school University of Pennsylvania, for instance, plans are underway to offer a course on the Singularity with a published Tentative Class Schedule. Unfortunately, the Working Bibliography shows an extreme towards the AI project, as if it were a reason to be wary of Singularity enthusiasts. Just wait until AI Superintelligence takes its rightful place on the most powerful in every advanced economy. The moving finger writes and, having writ, moves on.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Evolve

News Flash from the AI-MindForth front -- a discussion thread at http://evolve.multiforums.org/an-artificial-mind-t69.html shows that a programmer prob'ly a lot smarter than I am is considering a port of the MindForth AI into KFORTH (a Forth-like language) and/or into Ada and to evolve the new AI into the Evolve 4.0 Simulator. MindForth has already evolved once into the http-aimind-i.com program of Frank J. Russo in Win32Forth. A port into Ada could lead to a whole new branch in AI evolution. Godspeed to the AI evolutionaries!

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Mona

Today at the Ruby library I was working on the
Cyborg weblog and I noticed that "Odna Mona"
was the very first Follower of the weblog.
Thank you for Following a fellow cyborg.

It was strange that I clicked on "Odna Mona"
but it took me to no information about her.
Maybe "Odna Mona" is a new account that has
no profile associated with it.

Yesterday I was intending to set up Google AdSense
on the Cyborg weblog to try to make a trickle of
money from it. I was technologically not able
to complete the process, because the Ruby Internet
cafe and the Ruby library did not accept "cookies."
The AiLab computer with Windows 95 is too obsolete
to even log in to the Cyborg account. So I may
have to try again from the fancy computer of
"Matthews" and his wife "Ballerina."

But maybe I should not even have Google AdSense
on the blog. I have been thinking that maybe I
should just go ahead and publish the blog and
not worry about making money from it.

I am about to start a major, complex campaign in
the AI programming. It involves "self-referential
thought" on the part of the artificial Mind,
that is, the ability of the AI Mind to think
about itself and ask questions about itself.

As it is, the Mentifex AI is barely able to
answer the question, "Who are you?" When it
answers the question, it is primitively engaging
in self-referential thought. It thinks,
"I am (whatever)." It was extremely difficult,
and took decades, not years, for me to bring
the AI to the point of such primitive thought.

But now recently I have been realizing that
the AI Mind needs additional concepts and
English words (what; where; when; why) in
order to broaden and fully develop its
intellectual powers of self-contemplation.

We need to be able to ask the AI the question,
"Where are you?" and have it tell us not only
its location (e.g., "in the computer") but also
our own location (e.g., "out in the world").

We then need to make dialogs possible in which
the robot AI tries to learn every possible fact
about itself.

I have been noticing that there are webpages and
wiki-pages devoted to self-referential AI, and so
I feel that I am about to conquer some important
territory in AI expansion. Unless I am totally
misguided, of course. If I achieve good results,
I want to go to those various wiki-pages and
write up the AI results there. Wish me luck!

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Repurposing

Although this weblog was originally focused on
artificial intelligence (AI) in general, it is
being repurposed specifically for publishing and
archiving the MindForth Programming Journal (MFPJ)
in connection with the Google Code MindForth project
in open-source AI for robots. We tried to obtain "AI"
as the URL designation for this weblog, but "AI" was
already taken. We tried again with "mind" but it, too,
was taken. We tried "cyborg" for cybernetic organism,
and we obtained it -- back in 2001, the year of the
Space Odyssey.

Our blog about AI programming involves a wide range
of topics as enumerated in the list of links associated
with this blog -- from artificial intelligence on up to
a supercomputer on which we hope eventually to install
versions of our AI software. Our AI is meant as the
brains of a robot in control of sensor input and
actuator output. The design of our AI is based upon
linguistics and neuroscience.

We hope that Google AdSense advertisers will be
pleased to see their ads show up on our humble weblog.
Our audience will be small, select and high-strung,
because the dry and technical details of programming
artificial minds will probably not appeal to hoi polloi
surfing the Web for kicks and high-jinks. Probably only
decision-makers with large sums of discretionary tech
funds will bother to scrutinize our obscure AI blog.
Agents of industrial espionage may bookmark our blog in
order to scope out and scoop the futuristic AI landscape.
Nerdy geek types who are foolish enough to spend all their
money on building amateur robots -- they are among our
intended audience. We are writing for Joe Appcoder,
not Joe Sixpack. Joe Ivy in the philosophy department
might like us, too, but not Joe Couch Potato. We are
boring, dull, and of relevance only to the gleaners of
every tidbit about the coming Technological Singularity.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Wikipage


=== Disclaimer ===

This wiki-page discloses the existence of MindForth Programming Journal
(MFPJ) files and it links to on-line archives of MFPJ files, but it does
not itself contain actual MFPJ entries, for several reasons. Although an
MFPJ entry is part of the ultimate documentation of MindForth AI, it
only documents how MindForth came to be, and not what MindForth is at
its currently most developed state. Any attempt to record MFPJ entries
here at the Google Code MindForth (GC/MF) site would fail to be complete
and comprehensive. The earliest dozen or so volumes of MFPJ notations
exist only on paper and not in electronic or photographic form, and so
only later entries, and not all entries, exist as electronic files.
Some MFPJ entries were originally published on UseNet and other venues.
A goal for this wiki-page is gradually to link to as many MFPJ entries
as can be located and/or organized on-line.


=== Caveat ===

Since pages of the MindForth Programming Journal may or may not be
interesting to AI enthusiasts who wish only to evaluate the AI
Completeness of MindForth and who are not likely to be interested
in every little decision that was taken in the coding of the AI,
these MFPJ entries are organized and listed here for the sake of
providing too much information rather than too little. The MFPJ
files are not blared and trumpeted for people to look at. Rather,
the files rest quietly at diverse locations for perusal by true
AI enthusiasts of True AI. If someone wants to track down the
genesis of a feature in MindForth, these files may shed some light.


=== History ===

The MindForth Programming Journal (MFPJ) began in 1995 as a
handwritten record on paper of the efforts of MentiFex both to
learn the Forth programming language and to port MindRexx AI
into Forth on the Commodore Amiga 1000 computer. After an
initial flurry of activity, MindForth and its MFPJ diary
languished until the start of 1998, when the coding of
MindForth resumed truly in earnest and in response to
challenges encountered by MentiFex in the Inferno of UseNet.
Over the next decade, MFPJ entries were published sporadically
on-line as UseNet posts, usually to announce some advance in
the AI coding. A Google search on "MFPJ" may yield results.



=== Publication as Web Pages ===



For several months in 2008 on a trial basis, MFPJ entries
were published on-line at the following URL locations.

http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/fp080824.html


http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/fp080825.html


http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/fp080827.html


http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/fp080829.html


http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/fp080831.html


http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/fp080901.html


http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/fp080903.html


http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/fp080912.html


http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/fp080917.html


http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/fp080925.html


http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/fp080927.html


http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/fp080930.html


http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/fp081001.html



The files listed above as clickable links were created by
alternating between composing lines of AI source code and
documenting the process of coding in the MFPJ HTML file,
which was then uploaded to the Web. When the process of
coding became quite intense, sometimes only scant notes
went into the MFPJ file until satisfactory results were
achieved and recorded as <i>fait accompli</i> developments.
Along the way, it became obvious to the AI coder and
MFPJ diarist that each published page of the Journal was
indistinguishable from what Jorn Barger was the first to
call a weblog -- although he did not earn a dime from
inventing weblogs. Thanks to his efforts, though,
unto MentiFex may accrue some AiFunding if the MFPJ
actually becomes a weblog with advertisements interspersed.
Since each episode of MFPJ writing and MindForth AI coding
culminates in the release of a new version of the AI Mind,
there is plenty of opportunity to include weblog analogs
in the early stages of gathering ideas to commence coding.
All manner of BTW (by the way) links may be inserted into
the brainstorming portions of an MFPJ-as-weblog entry.