Vintage Artificial Intelligence: Before It Got Awkward

(blog.archive.org)

50 points | by signor_bosco 4 hours ago

6 comments

  • oidar 1 hour ago
    My favorite old AI named Tik-Tok - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tik-Tok_(novel)

    >Tik-Tok finds that he can do as he pleases, and he secretly commits various hideous crimes for his amusement. After manipulating both robots and humans to cause chaos and bloodshed, Tik-Tok becomes wealthy (partly through health care privatization) and is finally elected Vice President of the United States.

    • Mistletoe 9 minutes ago
      Oh, that's much too low, Tik-Tok was elected President.
  • ripe 1 hour ago
    Pretty good. Regarding Eliza, a version comes with Emacs, too. It's the "doctor" application. (The original Eliza was written as a generic engine running a pattern-matching "script").

    A quibble: the creator of Eliza was Joseph Weizenbaum, not "Wizenbaum".

  • ironqcold 1 hour ago
    Thanks for the collection. Racter was especially fun — his texts sound like they were written by a bot that had too much to drink and is trying to sound deep. But back in 1985, that was probably pretty impressive
    • classichasclass 1 hour ago
      The book is a better measure of what allegedly existed, though it was heavily curated, and the editorial choices in it say more about William Chamberlain than they do about the putative Racter itself.

      I did try feeding the book into a small LLM to generate more text but it either doesn't follow its unusually stilted prose, which is clearly templated, or it just vomits back the entire corpus which is not very large.

  • jonbaer 3 hours ago
    • jonbaer 10 minutes ago
      I gave up on more "advanced" features of AIML thinking "I will never have enough RAM memory for this on my ThinkPad" and yet here we are again. What a cycle.
    • DonHopkins 28 minutes ago
      AI was always awkward!

      Long before I ever encountered Richard Wallace's AIML (which was quite unintentionally silly, but not actually a joke, unfortunately), around 1996 I wrote some joke web pages to parody VRML, announcing "AIML: Artificial Intelligence Marketing Language", by taking a couple of gushing articles about VRML, strategically replacing "VR" with "AI", and tweaking just a few words.

      The point being that the VRML hype back then was as bad as the AI hype right now (well maybe not QUITE as bad). I don't have a very high opinion of VRML obviously! They didn't bother integrating it with an extension language at the time, so it was useless.

      AIML: Artificial Intelligence Marketing Language

      https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/aiml.html

      Support for AIML

      https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/SupportForAIML.html

      To go along with the AIML parody, and give it a whiff of authentic scientific research, I formatted as html and published an actual AI research paper with the funniest title ever, by a company called Roanoke AI Laboratories, Inc., from The Journal of Theriogenology. (NSFW, unless you work in the Artificial Insemination industry!)

      https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/AILabratories.html

      The author Jim Crump, Jr. actually found it by googling his name, and sent me a sincere email thanking me for formatting and publishing his AI paper on my web site, because his own publisher wouldn't allow him to publish his own paper on his own web site, due to draconian copyright restrictions. So I left it up because he was linking to it. Apparently it's well known in the AI Industry as the "Crump Technique". Attention is all horses need, too.

      I miss the early days of the web...

  • ForOldHack 3 hours ago
    Yes, this is very comprehensive, but only missing two things: Intelligence (IBM Mainframe ), Lotus H.A.L. ( Lotus 1-2-3 heuristic language processor ). ELiza came from LISP, MIT.

    RACTOR wrote a book, "The policeman's beard is half constructed."

  • DonHopkins 48 minutes ago
    Timothy Leary's Mind Mirror

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary%27s_Mind_Mirror

    https://store.steampowered.com/app/1603300/Timothy_Learys_Mi...

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32578683

    https://scalar.usc.edu/works/timothy-leary-software/index

    I extracted all the text from the Apple ][ Mind Mirror floppy disk image:

    https://donhopkins.com/home/mind-mirror.txt

    Mind Mirror Anthropic Skill and Documentation for MOOLLM:

    https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/mind-mi...

    The Prison Escape: Ultimate Validation

    In 1970, Nixon called Timothy Leary "the most dangerous man in America." Leary was sentenced to 10-20 years for marijuana possession — a draconian sentence designed to silence him.

    Upon arrival at the California Men's Colony, Leary was administered psychological tests to determine his security classification. Among them: the Leary Interpersonal Behavior Inventory — a test he himself had designed twenty years earlier.

    This was the ultimate field test of his own theory. If personality assessment truly revealed the inner self, Leary would be classified as what he was: a charismatic rebel, a leader, a flight risk.

    But Leary understood the instrument. He knew which quadrant of the Interpersonal Circumplex mapped to "cooperative worker" vs. "dangerous agitator."

    He answered strategically:

    Dominance axis: Low scores ("I prefer to follow")

    Hostility axis: Low scores ("I respect authority")

    Interests: Forestry, gardening, nature work

    Affect: Calm, conventional, agreeable

    The prison psychologists, applying the Leary Interpersonal Behavior Inventory to Leary himself, concluded:

    "Normal, well-adjusted, non-aggressive, conforming individual."

    Result: Minimum security. Outdoor work detail. Access to the grounds with minimal supervision.

    On September 12, 1970, Leary climbed a tree, shimmied across a telephone cable over the razor wire, and dropped to freedom. The Weather Underground had a car waiting. By October, he was in Algeria as a guest of the Black Panther Party's international chapter. By 1971, Switzerland.

    He evaded capture for over two years.

    ----

    Apple Software Bank Vol. 1: Bone Tumor Differential Diagnosis [Model 00114] © 1978 Apple Computer, Inc.

    An expert system written in APPLESOFT BASIC by Jeffrey Dach, M.D.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21582027

    DonHopkins on Nov 20, 2019 | prev | next [–]

    The classic Bone Tumor Differential Diagnosis program that Apple published for the Apple ][ in the original Apple Software Bank Volume 1 from 1978 sounds legit. But beware: it requires 32K of RAM, bigger than any other program in that volume! (Available on both cassette and 5-1/4" floppy disk for free from your local Apple dealer.)

    https://archive.org/stream/Apple_Software_Bank_Vol_1-2/Apple...

    https://archive.org/details/a2_Biology_19xx_

    https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documenta...

    Program Name: BONE TUMOR DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSIS

    Software Bank Number: 001 1 4

    Submitted By: Jeffrey Dach, M.D.

    Program Language: APPLESOFT II BASIC

    Minimum Memory Size: 32K Bytes

    This program is intended for use by qualified medical practitioners. While the specific data are of interest only to those familiar with bone pathologies, the programming techniques may well interest a wide range of computer users.

    INSTRUCTIONS

    LOAD the program into APPLESOFT II BASIC, and type RUN. Follow the instructions displayed on the screen. The program asks a series of questions concerning radiographic and clinical details of the bone tumor in question. For each question, type the number of the appropriate answer and press the RETURN key. Finally, the program uses Baye's rule and a predetermined probability matrix from Lodwick (1963) to calculate the relative probabilities of 9 different diagnoses.

    Some knowledge of descriptive terms for bone tumors is needed to answer the questions. Only a qualified physician should attempt to use this program as a diagnostic tool.