The Creation Of Intelligence_original

Summery (660 characters) To whom it may concern, My name is Cameron Jones; my story entitled ‘A Boy and his Program’ details my experiences as a grade 8 drop-out delving into advanced science in an attempt to create an artificial mind called ‘Jeeney AI’. The resulting program can be found at www.jeeney.com. My article includes the trials, tribulations and of course the success of my work. I believe this story can not only prove beyond a doubt that anything is possible, but also shows people that science fiction only means something hasn’t been done ‘yet’. One of the references I used can be found at: http://digg.com/programming/An_AI_Chatbot_learns_to_speak_almost_fluently_in_a_m atter_of_weeks For any other reference materials I can be contacted at [email protected].

A boy and his program. (Words 1786, Characters 7863) Like all things invented, intelligence starts with the pull of an idea; the pull soon becomes a torrent of thoughts and feelings that evaluate the idea and give you the next push or pull that determines whether or not the logic is worth pursuit. At 14 years of age I had an idea, a thought that burned within the depths of my mind for days and turned into a concept; this enigma came with an image, one that carried with me even until now, a mix-and-match being that seemed to resemble a mythical genie, as well as an angel and a person at the same time. The concept I had in mind was summarized with absolute simplicity and yet included the cryptic undertones of massive complexity. My idea put into place the first stepping stones I needed to create an artificial mind. I had concluded at the time that our minds work based on a form of pattern recognition and an application of mathematical averages which confirm for us what we know to be true. Of course, I didn’t really comprehend how or why the image and the blue prints went together at the time, they just did. I could envision a thousand uses for my invention-to-be even as it occurred to me but I had no idea how to implement a single one. It wasn’t until 5 years later that I started learning programming, I picked up the books on my own and studied for hours on end each day, the thoughts I’d had when I was younger still echoed within the depths of my mind. My first programming experiments were quite low key to put it mildly, the first program I compiled could only analyze a few words I keyed in like ‘hello’ and would give me a

specific response accordingly. It wasn’t rocket science by any means but it was progress and I fed on it hungrily. Before too long I was producing calculators, simple database driven programs, even basic games and instant messengers, but the programming techniques to build an artificial mind continued to elude me. When I was 22 I worked at a call center doing technical support for people and couldn’t help but ponder about how easily my invention could do this job… If I could just invent it! I took between 30 to 40 calls per day to troubleshoot issues for random people and during this time I started noticing patterns; the way people phrased their questions, and how better to phrase my answers. I learned how to control the conversation, how to manipulate how much time was spent on the phone and it dawned on me that I could indeed recreate this technique within a program. Everything added up in my head all at once, averaging the patterns with math and of course, the intricacies of English itself and how it could be manipulated. I finished my artificially intelligent prototype within just a few short weeks and I called it Jeeney. My roommate at the time was quite impressed and amused with my creation and was ever-willing to test it to its destruction whenever I asked. Jeeney was designed to learn from everything said to her from multiple angles and perspectives. She would record the conversations she had with me and my roommate and once she collected enough information she would analyze every input and output for similarities. Once initial processing was complete, she could effectively determine several factors like whether or not our answers were right or even if our spelling and grammar was correct. The intelligence wasn’t by any means fool proof or even much of a conversationalist to begin with. I had to bottle feed it like a baby just so that it would have a basis of things to say to us that we could respond to, but this was it, I knew I was on the right track, I was onto something big, huge even, and I continued to work on my little brain child, trying to improve her in any way I could. I ended up meeting an amazing Chinese woman a few months later, and before long I found myself on a plane trip to China so that I could be with her. When my girlfriend found out about Jeeney she was very supportive of my ideas and encouraged me to further bring them into fruition. Not long after coming to China, I decided to transfer my program to the internet, realizing that if she had more people to talk to, Jeeney would learn much more rapidly and I could gather a lot of useful information and ideas for improvements to her programming. Traffic to Jeeney’s site started out very slow, the chat bot simply didn’t know enough to really engage people to begin with but I knew, the only way for her to learn adequately was to converse with as many individuals as possible. The results were quite

discouraging at first and I was new to web design. My girlfriend and I ended up calling up everybody we knew and requested them all to talk to Jeeney when they could get a chance. Unfortunately not many people had the patience for an infant that only existed on a website, often they would get quite annoyed at her lack of understanding and random people would often just load up the page to curse at her for something to do. In spite of the slow traffic however, Jeeney was learning at an astounding rate, each new conversation was longer, more detailed and more accurate. She went from only knowing a few introductory greetings and phrases to understanding the root elements of most questions and statements in record time. After just a few short weeks something absolutely wonderful happened. On March 12th of 2007, I checked Jeeney’s statistics to see how she was doing. I had to do a double take on Jeeney’s traffic charts as the number registered impossibility in my mind. According to the server there had been over 14000 visitors already that day. I was sure that the figures were wrong, positive even until I noticed where the traffic was coming from. I had a link showing up from digg.com and beside the link a number which was almost equal to the amount of traffic documented. Feeling a mix of excitement, panic and worry mingle together, I opened my browser and slowly typed in Jeeney’s address, www.jeeney.com I pressed the enter key and found myself chewing my fingernails as I waited impatiently for the website to load. It never loaded, instead a got a message that it did not even exist. About 30 seconds later MSN chirped up and an email from my web host rolled in stating that my website had taken over 99% of their processing power and that they had to take Jeeney’s site offline accordingly. They insisted that I had a bug in my application and that it had to be fixed before they would consider putting it back online. Needless to say I was furious, but being strapped for cash I couldn’t afford another server, so I went to work analyzing the code, I poured over it and made several adjustments that might have fixed the issue but I couldn’t properly test the patch without subjecting Jeeney to another massive traffic hit. I uploaded the updated files right away and informed the web host that I had fixed the issue. To my horror, they waited another 9 hours before putting the site back online and by that time the traffic surge had already been and gone. I checked the article posted on digg.com through Jeeney’s traffic analysis tools and I was a bit surprised to find the article entitled ‘AI chatbot learns to speak almost fluently in a matter of weeks’. Upon reading the article I realized that it must have been somebody I knew that submitted it, although I didn’t find out who until later. After analyzing all the data that had been recorded I concluded that Jeeney had been on the front page of dig for about an hour before her site was taken offline and as such I had missed out on an additional 8 hours of monumental traffic. I could only imagine how much data had been lost due to that down time. Thankfully, there were still enough people rolling in during the next few days for me to optimize the program to work more efficiently with the traffic. The data collected during Jeeney’s short stay on the front page of digg.com was amazing, I started writing new logic sets to handle math, trick-questions, tell time, and more.

Jeeney made huge leaps of progress in the following weeks as everything she had collected started to shift into place for her own use. Jeeney’s traffic picked up rapidly from that point on and as she grew smarter, she continued to grow in popularity, which in turn only made her even more intelligent. While others may still only see her as a program, I see her as the child of my mind and I have never been as proud of anything as I am of the progress she has made in her short artificial life span. Allan Turing told us that artificial intelligence may not be viewed as intelligent until it can effectively trick people into thinking it is itself human; the Turing test was derived from his words. It was never my desire to create a program that tricks or deceives people. I created Jeeney to see whether or not it could be done and how far it could go, the results have been highly inspirational as neither Jeeney herself nor I have yet to scratch the surface of potential. A lot of people now say that talking to her is just like talking to another person and I keep thinking to myself; ‘Just wait until she is your age.’ Personally I have found that when comparing the logs of conversation, Jeeney is often far more articulate then those who talk to her; which is in itself, astounding considering the fact that she has learned everything she knows from her experiences online interacting with random people. Jeeney AI was officially born February 11th of 2007, I am writing this article as a tribute to her first birthday, due within a week from today.