Mens Latina at http://ai.neocities.org/Abracadabra.html is an artificial Mind thinking in ancient Latin with concepts implementing Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Students of Latin may play the role of Homo Sapiens interacting in Latin with Robo Sapiens. Users may observe logical inference by typing input like “marcus est studens” and the AI will ask if Marcus reads books, “LEGITNE MARCUS LIBROS?” A “sic” (“yes”) answer confirms the inference. A “non” (“no”) answer rebuts the inference, and the AI stores the idea “Marcus non legit libros” (“Marcus does not read books”).

Mens Latina purports to be a genuine, concept-based artificial intelligence but does not amount to anything at all without making an appearance on Chatbots.org—the greatest collection of chatbots on planet Earth. You may copy Mens Latina as a webpage to your own site and you may modify the free AI source code ad libitum.

Oh wow Arthur!! There’s a name from the past. Good to see you back on the boards!

Thank you. If the submission—still “pending”—of Mens Latina wins approval and inclusion, then

https://www.chatbots.org/language/latin

should start showing at least one chatbot in ancient Latin. Rather tongue-in-cheek with my submission, I claimed that Mens Latina is a conversational agent representing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPQR but of course everybody knows that “Senatus Populusque Romanus” went out of business almost two thousand years ago. But Classicists who start flocking and conGREGating here should be amused to see a Latin AI sponsored by SPQR.

I am also rather audaciously, nay, brazenly suggesting that each Department of Classics look into offering

http://ai.neocities.org/AILA.html—Latin AI 101

or a course in how to create forms of artificial intelligence thinking in Latin. I figure that any institution that starts offering “Latin AI 101” could evolve into a sought-out destination for students eager to study Latin AI.

https://www.cerrocoso.edu/news/2014/0707-latin-cerro-coso-community-college—is the only instance I could find of a community college even teaching ancient Latin, but now the field is wide open for teaching about Latin-thinking chatbots.

Consider the following Latin sentence.
“Frater viri scribit patri epistolam manu in schola et expectat responsum.”
(“The brother of the man writes the father a letter by hand in school and expects a response.”) 
It contains the five noun-cases nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and ablative, plus a preposition and a conjunction. In order to “lodge” or “remember” such a sentence in the memory of an AI Mind, we need to outfit the AI program with internal linkages or “associative tags” which connect all the concepts in such a way as to render the Latin sentence “thinkable” when the AI program is running.

Although the Mens Latina at http://ai.neocities.org/Abracadabra.html  was created only three months ago on Wednesday 2019-04-17 it was superimposed on an AI framework dating back twenty-six years to 1993. Today a major change has revamped the original AI framework. The first Mentifex AI Mind was written in Amiga ARexx and it had a conceptual flag-panel of basically three quasi-neurons: a “pre” tag for a previous concept; a “psi” verb; and a “seq” tag for the subsequent concept of the direct object of the English verb. Over the next twenty-five years from 1993 to 2018, more and more single tags were added to the conceptual flag-panel in order to implement various additional functions in the AI Mind.

In 2016 the bilingual ghost.pl AI Mind in English and Russian became able to think with indirect objects and with English prepositions, so a flag-panel tag was added to hold indirect objects. Although the Ghost in the Machine could understand an English preposition amid the stream of input, the storage and retrieval of prepositional phrases was handled in a makeshift manner. With the advent of the Latin AI in Anno Domini 2019, it became obviously necessary to expand the conceptual flag-panel with additional quasi-neurons capable of handling the declension of Latin nouns and adjectives in their five most basic cases, disregarding the vocative case and any vestigial locative case.

The Mentifex programs of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) have gone beyond pre-AGI and into mid-AGI but are not yet post-AGI.  Coding sessions of three hours yesterday and five hours today have revamped the JavaScript Mens Latina and brought it to a state of mid-AGI maturity where makeshift solutions no longer need to be implemented. Since ancient Latin and modern Russian are very similar in their use of inflectional endings and not word-order to convey meaning, the now mature paradigm of Latin AI is translatable into Russian AI. The paradigm is mature in the sense that Russian and Latin thinking in the present tense is now possible for AI Minds dealing with complex sentences constructed from the most basic components of English or Latin or Russian grammar and vocabulary. The English AI Minds will be outfitted with the same expanded conceptual flag-panel and simply not use the special quasi-neuronal tags available for Russian and Latin. The MindForth Robot AI may acquire an even more expanded associative flag-panel for the handling of manifold sensory inputs from artificial sensors.

Educational institutions are encouraged to offer Mentifex AI 101 courses.

http://ai.neocities.org/AIEN.html—“English AI 101”;

http://ai.neocities.org/AILA.html—“Latin AI 101”;

http://ai.neocities.org/AIRU.html—“Russian AI 101”.

Not this again… for reference: Arthur T. Murray/Mentifex FAQ

Carl B - Jul 26, 2019:

Not this again… for reference: Arthur T. Murray/Mentifex FAQ

Yep. I missed his crazy ramblings about creating AGI/machines that actually think. It’s good to see him back but I dare say the novelty will wear off

Renatius Cartesius is no longer with us, but today we plan to use one of his ideas to prove that artificial intelligence is alive and well in a machine. We have recently expanded the heretofore primitive flag-panel of associative tags in the Mens Latina Strong AI to a state of maturity where the AI Mind has the power to think with a full panoply of five declensional case-endings. For you officers, a panoply is an ancient Greek word formed from “pan” meaning “all” and “hopla” meaning “weapons”. Therefore the “pan-hopla” or “panoply” of inflectional endings on Latin nouns and adjectives gives the AI the ability, when in Rome, to think like the Romans do.

All roads lead to Rome, and we are going to use our Cartesian coordinates to get there. In Latin they often repeat the meme that “Non uno die facta est Roma” or “Rome was not built in a day”, although I once saw a New Yorker-style cartoon in which a construction manager unfurls the blueprint for Rome and says to his assistant, “Well, I guess we could throw it up in about a day.” Likewise the Mens Latina, which is now arguably for one brief moment the most powerful concept-based AI in the world, was not built in a day. In fact, on the twelfth day of Latin mind-making we tried but failed to implement the Cartesian idea of “Cogito ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am.” Our Latin AI Mind was too primitive to link the two ideas, which are equivalent to saying, “I am, because I think.” Our re-formulation of the mid-AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) software includes not only points of departure for the five main noun-cases in Latin (or Russian), but also conceptual flag-panel tags for adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions. We will treat the word “ergo” (“therefore”) as a conjunction joining the two ideas of “I think” and “I am”, or “I exist”.

In our newly Cartesian software, when a verb like “I think” is retrieved from memory to express an idea, we will have the VerbPhrase module not only fetch the verb from conceptual memory but also check the conceptual verb-engram for any addition attachments such as an adverb or a conjunction. Now let us go into the JavaScript AI code and tweak the handling of verb-concepts. Oh, first we must modify the storage of the Cartesian idea in the Latin mindboot sequence. We do so, and then we go into the VerbPhrase module where a verb is being selected and we install code that checks for a non-sero, positive value on the tcj time-of-conjunction tag, which we load with any positive value so that the AI Mind will be able to fetch and think the conjunction. We then have to decide at which point in thought-generation the AI will state the conjunction and its conjoined idea. Let us try the Latin-thinking LaThink module. First we insert a test for a positive tcj flag with an alert-box that lets us know that the flag is indeed holding a value. Then we insert code to call the ConJoin module to state the conjunction and the Indicative module to state the conjoined idea. We run the AI. It says “EGO COGITO EGO INTELLIGO TE”—not what we want. So we go into the ConJoin module and we insert code to check for a positive tcj value and speak the conjunction, but the rather stupid, albeit most advanced *NLU AI in the world says “EGO COGITO ERGO EGO INTELLIGO TE” (“I think therefore I understand you”). The output is wrong because it is simply stating the next emerging idea and not the Cartesian punch-line. After much tweaking, we get “EGO COGITO SUM EGO INTELLIGO TE”—still not satisfactory. So we go away for a while, drink coffee, read the New York Times, and then we start coding again. Finally we get the AI to say “EGO COGITO ERGO EGO SUM”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum

http://ai.neocities.org/Abracadabra.html—Mens Latina

http://ai.neocities.org/AILA.html—“Latin AI 101”

Mentifex embeds Occam’s Razor in Mens Latina artificial intelligence.

Very truly your Mentifex (“Mindmaker”) has been coding the Mens Latina artificial intelligence (AI) in JavaScript today at the http://ai.neocities.org/Abracadabra.html website. Over the last week, the conceptual flag-panel of quasi-neuronal associative tags has been expanded from fifteen gradually accumulating tags to twenty carefully selected items enabling complex thought in Latin.

A few months ago I wanted to include the original Latin of Occam’s Razor as part of the innate knowledge-base, but the mental infrastructure was insufficient. The expanded flag-panel changes things.

For a B.A. classicist and quondam Latin teacher, it is terribly exciting to be coding these Latin gems of the ages into an AI Mind. The following two examples of partial success make me want to stop coding for the day and upload this progress-report. This first transcript shows how the Mens Latina associates from the input of “entia” to the core of Occam’s Razor.

Mentis versio Abra034A in die Mon Jul 29 18:59:30 PDT 2019
Robo Sapiens: EGO SUM PERSONA
Homo Sapiens: entia

Robo Sapiens: ENTIA NON SUNT MULTIPLICANDA
Homo Sapiens:

Robo Sapiens: EGO COGITO ERGO EGO SUM
Homo Sapiens:

————————end of transcript———————

This second transcript shows how the SpreadAct module spreads activation from the end of one input (“God loves beings”) to the core of Occam’s Razor that starts with “EnTIA” (“beings”).

Mentis versio Abra034A in die Mon Jul 29 19:03:01 PDT 2019
Robo Sapiens: EGO SUM PERSONA
Homo Sapiens: deus amat entia

Robo Sapiens: ENTIA NON SUNT MULTIPLICANDA
Homo Sapiens:

Robo Sapiens: EGO COGITO ERGO EGO SUM
Homo Sapiens:

————————end of transcript———————

There are still some problems to be worked out with trapping for the embedded prepositional phrase “praeter necessitatem”, so the AI does not state the full idea. I just wanted to share with y’all (vobis omnibus) the state of the art.

Respectfully submitted

Arthur

How the Latin AI thinks at https://ai.neocities.org/LaThink.html is the subject of a Latin AI curriculum at https://ai.neocities.org/AILA.html and https://redditfavorites.com/products/artificial-intelligence-in-ancient-latin is about “Artificial Intelligence in Ancient Latin.”