jmpj0302

Moving the JavaScript AI towards Artificial Consciousness

Two important goals for the AI Mind in JavaScript are the already demonstrated Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and the not-yet-proven Artificial Consciousness. Before we work explicitly on consciousness, we remove the clutter of some obsolete tutorial display code from the MainLoop and elsewhere, so that the program as a whole may be easier to understand and work with.

We have a chance here to demonstrate an entity aware of itself and of some other entity such as a human user conversing with the AI. If we start claiming that our JSAI has consciousness, Netizens will test the AI in various ways, such as asking it a lot of questions. Typical questions to test consciousness would be "who are you" and "who am i". The interrogative pronoun "who" sets the qucon flag to a positive value of one so that the SpreadAct module may activate the necessary concepts for a proper response. We need a way to make the AI concentrate on the subject of any who-query, so that the AI will give evidence of consciousness simply by answering the question.

When we enter "god is person" and then we ask, "who is god", the AI answers "GOD AM A PERSON" -- which sounds wrong but which only requires an improvement in finding the correct form "IS" for the verb "BE".

may18jsai

The JavaScript artificial intelligence (JSAI) is a clientside AiApp whose natural habitat is a desktop computer, a laptop or a smartphone.

1 Wed.18.MAY.2011 -- Houston, We Have a Problem.

When we submit "who are you" as a query to the AI Mind, it searches the knowledge base (KB) and it remembers that it is ANDRU -- a ROBOT and a PERSON (a different answer each time that you pose the same existential question). Unfortunately, the software finds the first instance of each concept stored in recent memory and spits out the phonemic engram from the auditory memory channel without regard to whether the stored word is a singular form or a plural form. How can we get the most advanced open-source AI in these parsecs to stop saying "I AM ROBOTS"? The AI may have to start skipping over plural engrams when searching for a singular noun. Therefore, let us perform a little psychosurgery on the AI Mind software and see if we can zero in on a singular noun-form during self-referential thought.

First we use a few JavaScript "alert" boxes in BeVerb() and in NounPhrase() to see what values are being carried along in the variables that keep track of grammatical number as the AI Mind generates a thought in response to user input. We see that the subject number is available in the background, so perhaps we can alter the design of the Mind to insist on speaking a singular noun to go with a singular subject. Even though ROBOT and ROBOTS are the same concept, they are not the same expression of the concept. By the way, this issue is another AI mindmaker (Mentifex) problem that had to be solved in due course, that is, rather well along in the AI development process and not at the first blush of AI newbie enthusiasm.

Upshot: Gradually in the NounPhrase module we introduced code to skip over the retrieval of any word in auditory memory if the correct num(ber) was not found to match the the same number of the subject of an input query. The AI began to answer "who are you" with "I AM ROBOT". This bugfix makes the AI Mind more complex and therefore subject to potentially latent problems such as knowing a word only in the plural and not in the singular. However, the same bugfix brings the JSAI closer to machine reasoning and thinking with a syllogism such as, "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal."