Tarkblog

In tradition with the artificial intelligence program below, it reminded me of my 8th grade science fair project.

Our projects were mandatory and done at the school level. After the presentations, the teacher picked a few of the projects that would go on and complete at the regional level.

I partnered up with my friend Scott, someone who was much smarter, much cooler, but just as lazy as I. We were both computer gurus for the day (think Apple IIe and the Oregon Trail), and we decided to do a computer experiment.

I was teaching myself C at home on my own computer, and figured it would be a good way to do something neat with computers. We settled on artifical intelligence, and decided we would write up a program that you could interact with and carry on a conversation.

Many weeks passed, and Scott and I did nothing. Finally, it came crunch time and Scott came over to my house to figure out what we were actually going to do. At this point, we had two options:

Write a program
Find an already written program

We settled on the latter. I had a modem, and I dialed up Compuserve or GEnie or Delphi or Prodigy or whatever the online company was I was using at that time. I was pretty advanced for an 8th grader back in the day.

We found a program that was called Eliza, and it was a DOS based program that you could type questions and it would answer you back. It was really really well done, except for one problem: at the top of the program, while running, it had the name of the guy who wrote it and his CompuServe “id”.

Unfazed, we fired up a hex editor and directly changed the execuable to put our names on it.

It was genius, and we were both enamored.

But ethics soon set in and I thought “what would happen if this somehow got back to haunt us”. I guess I thought that we would get caught. I told Scott we should write our own, and use this program as a fall back plan.

Scott didn’t like this, but since I was the computer dude he didn’t have much choice.

So, together we wrote our own artifical intelligence program.

For a couple of early teens, it was pretty sophisticated programming. It turns out, however, that our program had no intelligence what so ever. We actually turned it around - we made it ask the user questions and then crafted phrases and responses based on their input. So, it really wasn’t artificial intelligence, but more like a computerized madlib.

I don’t remember how many things we put in, but it only asked a very few (like 6) questions before it looped around and started over again. We were out of time so there was no chance of going much more sophisticated.

On the day of the fair, I took the disk to school - it had both programs on it.

We fired up our custom written program for the science teacher. He proceeded to light up and really get into the subject of hte project. He typed in his responses.

He asked us some questions about the project, like he would do with all of the projects.

And this is where the miracle occurred. On the last question, after typing in his response, he didn’t pay attention to the fact that it looped back over again. He was done. He had to move on and grade the other projects in the time allotted.

He complemented us on such a great project - both getting As.

He also wanted us to enter at the regional level. Ugh, we knew our program would never fly at a higher level. We weren’t quite sure what we were going to do.

And then, we got the news - it turned out there was no category for “computer” based projects. So, we wouldn’t be able to enter our particular project in the fair. He had to settle on someone else.

Hooray.

—–

In related news, my buddy Scott had a party at his house, whilst his parents were away, at the end of our senior year in high school - with an open invitation to the whole senior class. I did not go, fearing the worst, and it was probably a good thing. After the party, the carpet was ruined in multiple rooms, and missing were the VCRs, stereos, most of the food from the kitchen, lots of random items from around the house. Needless to say, his parents found out, as did a lot of the parents’ of people who went to the party.

I believe Scott is now a patent attorney in DC. I wonder if he’s ever worked on AI patents.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 20th, 2005 at 11:56 am and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.