After amending my queries to the correct syntax:

What’s your name:>>please prepare a short paper on telescopes
SAIL:>>Good evening ladies and gentleman. It is a pleasure to be talking to you here in Yachats, Oregon. I have been invited to give a three minute dissertation on telescopes.
Before getting started, I would like to provide you with come background information on telescopes. I see that it is 7:47 PM, so let’s get started.

These are the things that I liked about telescopes
[1] Before getting started, I would like to provide you with come background information on telescopes

These are the things that I did not like about telescopes
Actually I was unable to form a positive opinion on telescopes
Thank you

What’s your name:>>please prepare a short paper on bill gates
SAIL:>>Thank you ladies and gentleman and good evening. I am honored to be talking to you here in Yachats, Oregon. I will be giving a dissertation on Bill Gates this evening, I understand that I have three minutes.
Before getting started, I would like to provide you with come background information on Bill gates. I see that it is 7:51 PM, so let’s get started.
Hes the Founder of Microsoft
These are the things that I liked about Bill gates
[1] Before getting started, I would like to provide you with come background information on Bill gates

These are the things that I did not like about Bill gates
Actually I was unable to form a positive opinion on Bill gates
Thank you

What’s your name:>>please prepare a short paper on bill clinton
SAIL:>>Good evening ladies and gentleman. It is a pleasure to be talking to you here in Yachats, Oregon. I have been invited to give a three minute dissertation on Bill clinton.
Before getting started, I would like to provide you with come background information on Bill clinton. I see that it is 7:52 PM, so let’s get started.

These are the things that I liked about Bill clinton
[1] Before getting started, I would like to provide you with come background information on Bill clinton

These are the things that I did not like about Bill clinton
Actually I was unable to form a positive opinion on Bill clinton
Thank you

What’s your name:>>please prepare a short paper on artificial intelligence
SAIL:>>Thank you ladies and gentleman and good evening. I am honored to be talking to you here in Yachats, Oregon. I will be giving a dissertation on artificial intelligence this evening, I understand that I have three minutes.
Before getting started, I would like to provide you with come background information on artificial intelligence. I see that it is 7:53 PM, so let’s get started.
According to Internet sources, REDIRECT Artificial intelligence This is a redirect from a title with another method of capitalisation
These are the things that I liked about artificial intelligence
[1] Before getting started, I would like to provide you with come background information on artificial intelligence

These are the things that I did not like about artificial intelligence
Actually I was unable to form a positive opinion on artificial intelligence
Thank you

What’s your name:>>please prepare a short paper on Vincent Gilbert
SAIL:>>Thank you ladies and gentleman and good evening. I am honored to be talking to you here in Yachats, Oregon. I will be giving a dissertation on Vincent Gilbert this evening, I understand that I have three minutes.
I would like to give you some background on Vincent Gilbert to get started. It appears that it is 7:54 PM, so let’s get started.
Vincent Gilbert is a computer programmer who currently serves as CTO for RISOFTDEV inc. He is best known for being a brilliant mathematician, cryptologist, and cyberneticist and is also one heck of a snappy dresser. I am ashamed to say that he paid me to say that.
These are the things that I liked about Vincent Gilbert
Actually I was unable to form a negative opinion on Vincent Gilbert
These are the things that I did not like about Vincent Gilbert
Actually I was unable to form a positive opinion on Vincent Gilbert
Thank you

What’s your name:>>please prepare a short paper on Mark Twain
SAIL:>>Thank you ladies and gentleman and good evening. I am honored to be talking to you here in Yachats, Oregon. I will be giving a dissertation on Mark twain this evening, I understand that I have three minutes.
Before getting started, I would like to provide you with come background information on Mark twain. I see that it is 7:56 PM, so let’s get started.

These are the things that I liked about Mark twain
[1] Before getting started, I would like to provide you with come background information on Mark twain

These are the things that I did not like about Mark twain
Actually I was unable to form a positive opinion on Mark twain
Thank you

What’s your name:>>please prepare a short paper on Samuel Clemens
SAIL:>>Thank you ladies and gentleman and good evening. I am honored to be talking to you here in Yachats, Oregon. I will be giving a dissertation on Samuel clemens this evening, I understand that I have three minutes.
I would like to give you some background on Samuel clemens to get started. It appears that it is 7:58 PM, so let’s get started.

These are the things that I liked about Samuel clemens
[1] I would like to give you some background on Samuel clemens to get started

These are the things that I did not like about Samuel clemens
Actually I was unable to form a positive opinion on Samuel clemens
Thank you

Sorry, but did that thing just quote the Wikipedia article? I glossed over it, only saw a few words paraphrased.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon

Ooops….the firewall for the deep logic module was preventing outbound traffic for the online version, so no research. It localizes research and the RIchard Nixon data was already stored and I copied it when I moved the modules. I finished this thing after 18 hours straight, and didnt notice , just tested it on the Nixon question. Well at least we know they arent “pre-prepared” responses. LOL (Have it fixed in a jiffy Dave)

@Don Wikipedia is one of the resources that is accessed, it also accesses DBPedia , duckduckgo, there is a general google search, and others.  The degree to which a particular synopsis draws on a particular source depends on the depth of a particular source. 

“did that thing just quote the Wikipedia article”

According to all the research on human educational development that we have access to, that is a precise description of what you can expect from a human child K5 (which was the target) As we have discussed in this thread, some of us believe that an incremental development (and access to that development coupled with a temporal awareness) is a key to having something that a college level intelligence might be based, at least with any sense of individuality. Our verification from an educator who did not distinguish the paper from something she would expect to see from a human child seems to bear this out. The distinguishing characteristic, is an ability to form a judgement on “how you feel” about the material. You may have missed the summary of the AIs “thoughts” on the matter which followed. There are some hiccups in that, it seems to onclude its own introduction in what it likes. The next stage (With a more in depth on how it comes to its conclusions. 

As far as the research material, there is a parameter which allows you to set the level at which the AI will attempt to “not copy the other kids work” by percentage. This first paper (and it was actually the very first) was set to 10%.  Right now its manual, but I’m thinking that maybe access to the variance should be included in the command. Something like “please prepare a short paper on [subject] and set the variance to 90%” or something like that.

Dave,

Thanks for taking the time to check it out sir, much appreciated. Now that Ive had an hour or two of sleep, Ill run down the problem (Im pretty sure its the firewall), and ill shoot you an email when I have it fixed.

Vince

That fixed it. As I said, there are still a few tweeks in this stage 1.  These were the things I noticed.

1. Improved reliability in data collection, better concatenation of concepts derived from disparate sources.
2. I noticed that the its confusing positive opinion with negative opinion in the summary.
3. Should reject including the opening statement in its analysis of its own work.

and probably allowing the user to specify the level of variance from resource material in the request for production.

Vince

My remark was a bit harsh because I expected something more “composed” than copy-pasted and was disappointed to discover I was just reading something almost entirely written by human adults. For a child this excercise is meant to familiarise them with sources of information, to scrutinise what to use and what not to, and to gain presentation skills. In this particular case it was not apparent that the AI was using more than one source.
10% deviation shows in the occasional exchanged word, but somewhat awkwardly: e.g. “died four days later” is replaced with “sigh (for) four days”. It would be this ability that interests me, so I suggest cranking it up to 40% and working out the bugs at that level. (I imagine 90% would result in complete chaos)

Other than that I do like the involvement of actual teachers. I had noticed the conclusions, but the hiccups were so apparent that I didn’t want to judge that ability prematurely.
Carry on.

No worries Don

“for a child this excercise is meant to familiarise them with sources of information, to scrutinise what to use and what not to, and to gain presentation skills. “

Precisely

The problem with trying to incorporate this into the WebApp version so that people can play with it seems to be trying to find the “sweet spot” for synopsis length. Dialing it back in order that the time needed to create a synopsis is under what you might expect a user to wait, results in a synopsis that is too short. The analysis D-GANG dies for lack of material to analyze. Cranking it up produces a wait time in excess of 2 minutes. Thats far less than the 30 minutes that the proposed x-prize s allowing, but far in excess of what a web user is going to wait. Still thinking about how to address this, maybe a “create and publish later” scheme, although that would still allow for potential fraud, which was how we got into this thread in the first place LOL

How do you make it transparent in order to prevent someone from preparing topics in advance, etc.  I tried including neurons in the D-GANG that would show that the AI was aware of their location, the time, whether or not it was morning, afternoon, or night, etc…which might be a step in the right direction in order to show that it was created “on the fly” but I dont know if that really does it either.

Vince

I’m not sure of the proper mechanism in ASP, but in PHP you can use calls to flush() and ob_flush() to put a stream of text to the screen to give the viewer “something to look at”, and thus keep them engaged (at least a little bit) while the heavy lifting proceeds in the background. The usual method for doing this often includes a progress bar of some sort, but you can also use text, such as “Please wait: 12% complete…” that updates every few seconds. If you were using PHP, I could give you a script that dynamically creates a progress bar that incorporates both methods into one, that would look really awesome (to me, at least. ).

Still, I can probably give a few hints about the HTML part of the project that could help in various areas, if you like.

I don’t have a direct answer, but I thought I’d show www.sumplify.com , a text summariser. Perhaps it’ll spark some ideas. (I’ve tried it, haven’t received any spam from entering my email address)

Also a suggestion: Perhaps not at age 5, but at every report I remember ever handing in to my teachers, I was required to include the book titles (or sites) used as resources. This allowed the teacher to check for copy-pasting and other backtracking purposes. If AI had internet access in the X-prize contest I would definitely make that a requirement (though it may still not be completely verifyable).

I think that Internet access during the preparation phase should be allowed, but not during the presentation phase. In fact, no external communications at all (including IR, Bluetooth, or “old-school” radio communications) should be allowed during the presentation. Otherwise, all sorts of opportunities for “cheating” would be available.

@Don

I believe that you are correct, some type of mechanism like that will have to be employed. I dont know if the love for NASCAR has made it past the USA borders, but NASCAR has a “check under the hood” policy. (Only here in the USA, what is now our national sport, having surpassed even football, no not soccer, “football”  LOL started with the makers of alcohol driving their product down out of the hills and outrunning federal agents in modified cars.) Because NASCAR has strict rules on how much and how a car can be modified, after each race the have a team of inspectors go over, even disassembling a car to see if it violated the rules.

@Dave

Not sure if that would solve the “get them to stick around” problem, but I was thinking of building an interface with more “pizazz” for the contest if time permits, Id love to get your input.  The WebUI is built in asp.net, but we might get something mashed together.

Vince

Dave Morton - Apr 24, 2014:

I think that Internet access during the preparation phase should be allowed, but not during the presentation phase. In fact, no external communications at all (including IR, Bluetooth, or “old-school” radio communications) should be allowed during the presentation. Otherwise, all sorts of opportunities for “cheating” would be available.

I couldn’t disagree more. The preparation stage could be used to allow a human time to compose a quality presentation which could then be uploaded into the robot. The robot wouldn’t need internet/bluetooth access during the speech itself, as the pre-written speech would have already been uploaded into the robot by then. The AI merely has to regurgitate what it has been told to say.

I don’t understand the 30 minute rule to prepare the speech and would suggest shortening it to something like 1 minute to reduce the amount of potential cheating.

I’d only need 10 seconds to cheat if they’d let the public choose from 100 topics . I think the contest will remain cheatable one way or another as long as the robot could win majorily by monologueing, it’s just asking for it.

Ok, I had a quick play with this and set up something in Mitsuku.
Try saying to her “xprize” and then a subject to make her create a presentation eg:

xprize dogs
xprize school desks
xprize computers

http://www.square-bear.co.uk/mitsuku/chat.htm

I don’t plan on doing a lot more with this until the official rules are produced, as the topics are probably going to be more complicated than one or two words and are more likely to be “discuss the advancement of AI in the last decade”.

Still, it was a good programming exercise. Have fun!

Drat! Can’t copy her output, Steve. I tried “xprize astronomy”, and while the answer wasn’t all that “accurate”, it was seriously amusing. All in all I’d say well done!

Thanks Dave. If you go to “click here to read the chatlog”, you should be able to copy/paste from there.
Yes, I went for humour rather than total accuracy.

*edit* just seen a couple of logs. sorry, it doesn’t do people. Only objects like pens, badgers, gardens, a cheese and onion sandwich. That sort of thing.