[seanlevan]

While I understand where you are coming from, obviously the bot is not flawless, but it is ridiculous to compare our technology today to Eliza. ACUMAN uses a wealth of knowledge bases and natural language processing to comprehend and accurately give responses. Obviously, the field is invariably complex, but I find it absurd to say that it has increased so little, considering that it was never dreamed of that a bot would be able to answer the exact release date of a specific musical album, for instance.

It is still a work in progress, but I don't understand why it would be a huge turnoff that there was a simple grammatical error in the bot where he inadvertently prepended a contraction "it's" before the actual answer.

[ColinWright]

From the two responses I've had it would seem that my comment is going to be misunderstood and misinterpreted. Fair enough. I could write essays on this (in fact, I have when I took Philosophy as a minor to accompany my Pure Maths and Computer Science courses) and comments here just aren't going to cut it.

As I say, fair enough.

The responses I'm getting from it have a consistent feel. They are either reciting facts, or they are totally non-committal. Here:

    "I don't like picking favorites. Everything
     that is something regarded with special favor
     or liking seems good to me."

That has all the feeling of a canned response.

I know the advances that have been made, I know how impressive this thing actually is, I know how hard it is to do this, and I know the work that must have gone into it. And even knowing all of that, when it makes what are to humans trivial grammatical mistakes, it takes away from all that and reduces it to a machine.

My comments are not intended to diminish the accomplishment, but to highlight a place where the illusion gets broken. If you have a large, totally white canvas with one small, off-center black dot, what will people look at?

So please understand that this is not a dismissal of the work, or of the achievement, but a highlighting of one specific point that disproportionally detracts from the effectiveness.

To continue to provide feedback to try to help, it just rendered like this:

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/acuman.png

Latest Firefox on latest Ubuntu. edit: That's just a grab of part of the screen, I can do the whole window if you'd like to see the context.

Edit: It would be nice to have some details about how it is doing what it's doing. They might be there, but I haven't had time to rummage much, as I'm in the middle of other things. Someone mentioned AIML. I will be back to look again later.

[madaxe_again]

So, I asked it:

What's e^i(pi)+1?

The response was... a little out. I'm impressed it had a crack at least.

"It's 2.69740975483297316969108251300445672427640640289560... + 2.64355906408145617888606598966971861665798063847235.."

Edit:

Heh, asked it the square root of i, and the answer made me chuckle:

The square root of you is (-1)^(1/4).

I don't know why I'm expecting a bot to know complex plane mathematics and euler's identity.

[ColinWright]

Its response to your first question is in fact exactly right, because you didn't ask what you thought you asked. Your brackets are in the wrong place. You asked:

    e^i(pi)+1

which is:

    (pi * (e^i) ) + 1

which is:

    2.69740975.. + 2.64355906... i

So it was right.

And sqrt(i) is sqrt(sqrt(-1)) which is (-1)^(1/4), so again, it was right (excepting that it put "you" instead of "i")

So it did better than you think.

[madaxe_again]

D'oh, you're quite right. In that case, top marks!

[EugeneOZ]

> excepting that it put "you" instead of "i"

just one drop of the sense of humor maybe :)