To introduce myself properly...

[DanteAshton]

I am Dante, and I'm as close as it gets to being a God of Artificial Intelligence

I've worked on many projects involving AI. Too many, some might say...

Last year, just after my birthday, I switched to full time usage of Linux. Yes, there were problems (there always are in these sorts of things) but thankfully I had 'accidentally' performed a soft migration. I'd found things like VLC, which was a god-send (previously, I had Quicktime, RealPlayer...god knows how many other programs...all attempting to align my music collection to their formats, GAH!) OpenOffice, Pidgin...

My first distro was Mandriva for a while (nice people on the forums there, it just seems now as though the Mandriva devs have rather lost interest in the whole thing) then Ubuntu (forums too big to get help for a good deal of the time) now Kubuntu (after a load of work to get it off the ground in the first place)

I had grown up with Windows, the very first computer I used had MS-DOS on it (yes, I am a tad young at 18, and it's a strange memory, one of my earilest, of sitting on my Mother's knee, bewildered whilst I played a DOS game) my Father provided the computer and OS. When Microsoft started putting in that activation system for it's OSes..well, we had problems. We couldn't afford to buy it, so we just borrowed the disk off somebody, installed and gave it back. (To this day, my Father still can't understand why the passphrase on Windows XP runs out after three installs)

I, more then most, know Window's failures and downsides. I played Pirate for a while, something which I'm NOT proud of. Imagine the breath of fresh air when I came to this fabulous world...FOSS (for the most part).

I left Ubuntu because me and the GNOME desktop fell out, more then once had I witnessed a large amount of requests for a tool to download items from GNOME-Look (to give but one example) and those requests have been ignored. Tools I needed (like a GUI front-end for Festival) were lacking in GNOME. I saw GNOME 3.0, and I did not like what I see (GNOME-Shell in particular, I have only ever used another desktop because an app, like Evolution, could not dock into the system tray. The most basic of all tasks...) and around that time, the whole MONO mess was starting.

Now, the thing about MONO is, regardless of it's maker and it's makers less then happy history with Linux, Mono apps are quite intensive to run. I don't want my music player taking up 500mb of system memory when idle. :/

My latest adventures have had me in the world of NEPOMUK (which, by the by, I will be releasing a end-user document shortly) and I'm pushing for more AI tech (face recognition, optical character recognition) to be put into KDE.

That's me in a nutshell, really. Ask me anything about AI, literally, anything.

[GreyGeek]

Re: To introduce myself properly...

Hi Dante!!!

Nice to meet you!

I'm called GreyGeek because at a Linux user group on the campus of the University of Nebraska about 5 years ago it was determined that I was the oldest Linux user there. They started refering to me as the GreyGeek and it stuck. I was 63 at the time. My 68th will come this Aug 8th.

AI god, eh? 8)

About 15-20 years ago or so, while I was running my computer consulting business, there was a lot of interest in Neural Networks (back propagation with multi-layered slabs, various numbers of input and outputs, various triggers, etc...). I played a lot with the concept and wrote some software in Pascal to learn more about it. While I found no practical applications for the kinds of financial software I was writing at the time, I was curious about the mathematical aspects, since I used to teach math through DE at York College for almost a decade.

I haven't kept up with it since then, except to get a vague feeling that interest in it had died down because many began calling Neural Nets nothing but fancy hashing algorithms, and one of the journals on the topic ceased publication.

In 1980 I became business partners with another individual and we bought a 12 state contract to sell a peripheral card that plugged into Apple ][= computers called "SAVVY". Have you heard of it? It's creators called it an AI device but they exaggerated. It was built on a PICK DB back end with a FORTH front end (man do I love FORTH!) and had the ability to be "teachable" and to understand ordinary sentences, misspellings and all, and return results based on the request. Part of the front end pre-process was to break a sentence up into words, alphabetize the words and remove redundancies, then *****, and save it in the DB back end. Almost like a soundex algorithm, but the ***** part added some punch. You could type "Give me a list of all customers in Kansas with balance dues greater than $1,000 and sort the list by zipcode and address." Misspellings, leaving out words, adding extra words.... It would do it. If you used a word it didn't "know" it would throw up the closest 5 or so items to it and ask you to select one of them or teach it a new word. Later it became a software product for the IBM PC and didn't require a card. In 9 months I sold enough of those cards to generate over $300,000 profit. Then, my partner created a secret dummy account in his wife's name, moved the profits out of our business to it, and declared bankruptcy, leaving me and his OWN son high and dry. He set his other son up as a bar owner in a south eastern NE town. Unfortunately for him, his wife was having an affair with a Hells Angels fellow. They left for California with the cash, leaving him high and dry. He thought he'd go down to the bar and take it from his son, but it was in his son's name. His son gave him a broom and a free room over the bar. He drank himself to death within 5 years.

So, how is work on AI progressing? What areas of AI have you worked in and have you written any code and/or published any articles on your area of AI?

P.S. - I saw you were having problems getting Kubuntu to work, and I replied to your other msg about your problems. I made a recommendation about a distro you might try. Regardless, it is been a while since I've met anyone with any knowledge of AI and I'd like to catch up on the topic. Now that I am retired every night is like Friday night and and every day is like Saturday!

[Qqmike]

Re: To introduce myself properly...

Welcome to the board Dante.

Wish I could talk some AI with you, but, well, my exposure to it was only as a learning experience for LISP and Pascal, and that would be back in 1975, believe it or not in a Production & Operations Management course in a school of management (Indiana University). You know, the games and such, the Missionary & Cannibal problem, chess (1-, 2-, 3-, 4-move look ahead), learning about trees and such, heuristics, that sort of thing.

As for GreyGeek, interesting "dark-side" story about your business resolution and your partner. I have a few colorful stories like that myself here and there in the personal and family history.

Again, Dante, welcome aboard!

[DanteAshton]

Re: To introduce myself properly...

Well, it seems you went through what people generally call the 'AI Winter'.

I used to be a journalist for the AI Hub, a news website. I left a while ago for a change of pace, I wanted to MAKE the news, not write about it :P

During my time, I assisted with Jeeney AI, a chatbot (that won this years Chatterbox Challenge) I assisted on the design of it, but never the code. I eventually left THAT project because the developer refused to use FOSS (due to the GPL) technologies to save him time. He also refused to open-source the code, something I saw, and still see, as counterproductive., when something like Jeeney could benefit a lot of people.

Your story proves that life is not without a sense of irony, my friend :P

GreyGeek, it seems you have some experience with natural language systems...and I could REALLY do with your help. I only know a bit of LISP, but I'm savvy enough to understand what programmers babble on at length about. Please reply if you want to assist. I'm afraid, me being 18 and disabled, I could not easily pay for any coding to be done, but I'm sure I could work something out, if a financial incentive is needed.

Hopefully,

-Dante

[GreyGeek]

Re: To introduce myself properly...

Sorry Dante. Yours will be the third request in as many weeks, but I've retired from programming a year ago. I thought I would start a project after I retired, but in the last year my wife and I have had too much fun doing what we want to do, and spending time with our grandchildren. Thinking about my own possible projects I realized that my passion for programming isn't what it used to be. What help I do volunteer is toward helping a dozen or folks who are older than me when ever they have troubles running the Linux OS I've installed on their computers, but they seldom have problems.

Any spare time I have is usually spent here or at LinuxToday.

[DanteAshton]

Re: To introduce myself properly...

Damn...I was hoping to develop a conversational interface for Linux, quite like what you described. This would fit nicely with many plans laid out for GNOME and KDE. Not to mention bring the future a little closer...

Ah well, could I at least ask you provide some assistance, if possible? Not code wise, but, well, you have a lot more experience here then I do.