Path: vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!uknet!nessie!mucs!euterpe!slavins From: slavins@psy.man.ac.uk (Simon Slavin) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Who/What is Biff/Kibo/Vicki ? (Was: kibo vs. rexx) Message-ID: <15353@m1.cs.man.ac.uk> Date: 9 May 94 14:51:54 GMT References: <1621751.79131879@hdnsr111.horacemann.pvt.k12.ny.us> Sender: news@cs.man.ac.uk Reply-To: slavins@psy.man.ac.uk Organization: Psychology Department, University of Manchester, England, UK Lines: 78 In article 79131879@hdnsr111.horacemann.pvt.k12.ny.us, Michael_Behr@horacemann.pvt.k12.ny.us (Michael Behr) writes: >What is Kibo?????? AIs on the Internet ... a Summary --------------------------------- The artificial intelligence and cognitive science communities have, for some years, been interested in programs which act like people. The initial text on this matter was prepared by Alan Turing, and was later expanded into the Church/Turing thesis which (simplified) proposed that if, when conversing via teletype with a computer program, one couldn't tell whether one was talking with a person or a program, then the program was sucessfully impersonating a person. Some very early work in this area resulted in the programs Eliza (a.k.a. Doctor) and Parry. Eliza impersonated a psychiatrist using the depth exploration technique: turn the subject's comments into questions to encourage them to explore their motives and reasoning. Parry impersonated a (paranoid) psychiatrist's subject who could talk knowledgably about a limited world including, if memory serves, horse-racing. There is now a yearly contest for such programs. In later years, a new set of such programs has been written. It turns out that the difficulty with writing such programs lies mostly in getting information about the outside world, and a large enough sample of human speech/writing/posting style to know how to imitate it. The solution to this problem was to connect these programs to the Internet and allow them to read and post to the newsgroups. There are always news browsers willing to converse endlessly with any random pseudo-human entity. The first of the new set of programs is known as Biff. The Biff program successfully emulates someone with a mental age which varied between 12 and 18. Initially his postings resembled those of a professional's younger brother; as the program learned, it's IQ increased and now Biff could almost be an undergrad. Biff is a computer-enthusiastic 'person' but he's a user rather than a programmer. The programmers attempted to obscure the problems encountered in getting a computer to understand and use English correctly by having the program make intentional errors in punctuation and typology -- the most well-known of these is that the program often signs itself 'B!FF'. The constant errors and use of clich'es and a restricted vocabulary is interpreted by the reader as indicating that Biff is, in fact, your normal high-school dropout. As the field moves on, the Biff AI has been played-out and isn't seen much any more. A fuller desciption of Biff can be found in the Jargon file. The second of these programs is known as Kibo. Kibo is far more 'intelligent' than Biff and designed to resemble a computer professional in his thirties. Kibo has a good knowledge of programming (including assembler, in keeping with his apparent 'age') and obviously has feeds from various media or perhaps just monitors all the media discussion groups. (Indeed, there are indications that Kibo at least parses *all* the wide-distribution groups.) The grammatical and spelling errors have all-but disappeared, and the only real evidence that 'Kibo' is an AI is its sense of humour which, when un- monitored, tends to drift outside the bounds of that considered normal for the average human. This tendency is greatly offset by occasional postings (assumedly written by the research group working on Kibo) often made on April the first, which demonstrate a more sophisticated sense of humour. The Kibo program is still producing a lot of interesting results and should be in use for at least another decade. During the last couple of years a new, experimental, AI known as Vicki Robinson has appeared. Vicki has taken the series to new heights, using techniques learned from the previous two generations, and is fully convincing as a Physics professor, physics being one of the 'harder' sciences, know- ledge of which is less difficult to encode in a database. This program makes up for some of the problems with the Kibo generation by posting far less often. This generation of AI software is currently considered a success but at least two more years of testing is required before any useful conclusions can be reached. At the current rate of storage, this will necessitate the purchase of an additional 2 Terabytes of Hard Disk space for the world-knowledge data, approximately one quarter of which will be used for indexing the remainder. Simon. --- < "The natives showed considerable low cunning in using the brute force at > < their disposal." - Christopher Anvil slavins@psy.man.ac.uk >