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- Hacker News
- rock and roll is the devil!by jkuli
- Timothy Leary's Mind Mirror
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary%27s_Mind_Mirror
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1603300/Timothy_Learys_Mi...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32578683
https://scalar.usc.edu/works/timothy-leary-software/index
I extracted all the text from the Apple ][ Mind Mirror floppy disk image:
https://donhopkins.com/home/mind-mirror.txt
Mind Mirror Anthropic Skill and Documentation for MOOLLM:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/mind-mi...
The Prison Escape: Ultimate Validation
In 1970, Nixon called Timothy Leary "the most dangerous man in America." Leary was sentenced to 10-20 years for marijuana possession — a draconian sentence designed to silence him.
Upon arrival at the California Men's Colony, Leary was administered psychological tests to determine his security classification. Among them: the Leary Interpersonal Behavior Inventory — a test he himself had designed twenty years earlier.
This was the ultimate field test of his own theory. If personality assessment truly revealed the inner self, Leary would be classified as what he was: a charismatic rebel, a leader, a flight risk.
But Leary understood the instrument. He knew which quadrant of the Interpersonal Circumplex mapped to "cooperative worker" vs. "dangerous agitator."
He answered strategically:
Dominance axis: Low scores ("I prefer to follow")
Hostility axis: Low scores ("I respect authority")
Interests: Forestry, gardening, nature work
Affect: Calm, conventional, agreeable
The prison psychologists, applying the Leary Interpersonal Behavior Inventory to Leary himself, concluded:
"Normal, well-adjusted, non-aggressive, conforming individual."
Result: Minimum security. Outdoor work detail. Access to the grounds with minimal supervision.
On September 12, 1970, Leary climbed a tree, shimmied across a telephone cable over the razor wire, and dropped to freedom. The Weather Underground had a car waiting. By October, he was in Algeria as a guest of the Black Panther Party's international chapter. By 1971, Switzerland.
He evaded capture for over two years.
[...]
Bob Dietz, co-creator, on working with Leary:
"His vision was way out there in the future so a lot of what we had to do was kind of pull it back a little bit and say well, this machine can't do all that. He always had these kind of big vision things of wanting to do three-dimensionally and you know have the computer react to everything you said and with artificial intelligence."
On Leary's goals:
"He was all about self-empowerment, giving the users the keys to the kingdom."
On the internet vision:
"I cannot begin to tell you how much Timothy Leary would have embraced and loved the notion of seeing Mind Mirror applied on the internet."
----
Apple Software Bank Vol. 1: Bone Tumor Differential Diagnosis [Model 00114] © 1978 Apple Computer, Inc.
An expert system written in APPLESOFT BASIC by Jeffrey Dach, M.D.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21582027
DonHopkins on Nov 20, 2019 | prev | next [–]
The classic Bone Tumor Differential Diagnosis program that Apple published for the Apple ][ in the original Apple Software Bank Volume 1 from 1978 sounds legit. But beware: it requires 32K of RAM, bigger than any other program in that volume! (Available on both cassette and 5-1/4" floppy disk for free from your local Apple dealer.)
https://archive.org/stream/Apple_Software_Bank_Vol_1-2/Apple...
https://archive.org/details/a2_Biology_19xx_
https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documenta...
Program Name: BONE TUMOR DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSIS
Software Bank Number: 001 1 4
Submitted By: Jeffrey Dach, M.D.
Program Language: APPLESOFT II BASIC
Minimum Memory Size: 32K Bytes
This program is intended for use by qualified medical practitioners. While the specific data are of interest only to those familiar with bone pathologies, the programming techniques may well interest a wide range of computer users.
INSTRUCTIONS
LOAD the program into APPLESOFT II BASIC, and type RUN. Follow the instructions displayed on the screen. The program asks a series of questions concerning radiographic and clinical details of the bone tumor in question. For each question, type the number of the appropriate answer and press the RETURN key. Finally, the program uses Baye's rule and a predetermined probability matrix from Lodwick (1963) to calculate the relative probabilities of 9 different diagnoses.
Some knowledge of descriptive terms for bone tumors is needed to answer the questions. Only a qualified physician should attempt to use this program as a diagnostic tool.
by DonHopkins - by jonbaer
- I gave up on more "advanced" features of AIML thinking "I will never have enough RAM memory for this on my ThinkPad" and yet here we are again. What a cycle.by jonbaer
- I worked for an instant messaging company circa 99-05 and one of our skunkworks was a help bot using AIML and Alice. It was mostly good for laughs but this makes me want to go refresh my memory on how it worked.by LastTrain
- AI was always awkward!
Long before I ever encountered Richard Wallace's AIML (which was quite unintentionally silly, but not actually a joke, unfortunately), around 1996 I wrote some joke web pages to parody VRML, announcing "AIML: Artificial Intelligence Marketing Language", by taking a couple of gushing articles about VRML, strategically replacing "VR" with "AI", and tweaking just a few words.
The point being that the VRML hype back then was as bad as the AI hype right now (well maybe not QUITE as bad). I don't have a very high opinion of VRML obviously! They didn't bother integrating it with an extension language at the time, so it was useless.
AIML: Artificial Intelligence Marketing Language
https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/aiml.html
Support for AIML
https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/SupportForAIML.html
To go along with the AIML parody, and give it a whiff of authentic scientific research, I formatted as html and published an actual AI research paper with the funniest title ever, by a company called Roanoke AI Laboratories, Inc., from The Journal of Theriogenology. (NSFW, unless you work in the Artificial Insemination industry!)
https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/AILabratories.html
The author Jim Crump, Jr. actually found it by googling his name, and sent me a sincere email thanking me for formatting and publishing his AI paper on my web site, because his own publisher wouldn't allow him to publish his own paper on his own web site, due to draconian copyright restrictions. So I left it up because he was linking to it. Apparently it's well known in the AI Industry as the "Crump Technique". Attention is all horses need, too.
I miss the early days of the web...
by DonHopkins - An interesting fact I learned while reading The Dream Machine[1], is that Newell, Simon and Shaw’s Logic Theorist (1956) was considered to be the “first AI program”.
Quoting from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_Theorist
“Logic Theorist is a computer program completed in 1956 by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, and Cliff Shaw.[1] It was the first program deliberately engineered to perform automated reasoning, and has been described as "the first artificial intelligence program".[1][a] Logic Theorist proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in chapter two of Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica, and found a new and shorter proof for Theorem 2.85.[3] [1] https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine”
Amusing and amazing to see this in the context of today’s Erdos-slaying LLMs.
by d4rkp4ttern - Thanks for the collection. Racter was especially fun — his texts sound like they were written by a bot that had too much to drink and is trying to sound deep. But back in 1985, that was probably pretty impressiveby ironqcold
- The book is a better measure of what allegedly existed, though it was heavily curated, and the editorial choices in it say more about William Chamberlain than they do about the putative Racter itself.
I did try feeding the book into a small LLM to generate more text but it either doesn't follow its unusually stilted prose, which is clearly templated, or it just vomits back the entire corpus which is not very large.
- Yes, this is very comprehensive, but only missing two things: Intelligence (IBM Mainframe ), Lotus H.A.L. ( Lotus 1-2-3 heuristic language processor ). ELiza came from LISP, MIT.
RACTOR wrote a book, "The policeman's beard is half constructed."
by ForOldHack - I fired up RACTER but I couldn't get it to do anything half as interesting as MegaHAL, whomst once told my brother, "Pop is just water with a good director"by mikestorrent
- And that book is (naturally enough) borrowable on archive.org. :)
https://archive.org/details/policemansbeardi0000unse/page/n2...
by quuxplusone - The Racter book, "The policeman's beard is half constructed" is also available on the net as a pdf:
https://www.ubu.com/media/text/racter/racter_policemansbeard...
by JoeDaDude - Pretty good. Regarding Eliza, a version comes with Emacs, too. It's the "doctor" application. (The original Eliza was written as a generic engine running a pattern-matching "script").
A quibble: the creator of Eliza was Joseph Weizenbaum, not "Wizenbaum".
by ripe - The Genealogy of ELIZA
https://sites.google.com/view/elizagen-org/#h.rle1hgawpigd
Kent Pitman's Lisp Eliza from MIT-AI's ITS History Project (sites.google.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373567
xyzzy_plugh on Feb 18, 2024 | next [–]
Evergreen quote from TFA:
> KMP provided some additional thoughts on his ELIZA:
> "The thing about the DOCTOR program, while it was quite elaborate, was that it sort of missed the point of what Weizenbaum was trying to say. It's not that I didn't understand him, but it took me a long time to really come to viscerally understand the seriousness of his point. He said that (paraphrasing, maybe badly, from memory) long before we got to real AI, we would get to things that seemed smart but weren't, and we would overly trust systems that were not really smart. He was, for example, very worried about computerized launch of nuclear missiles using what was then thought to be AI. But the point of the original ELIZA was not to BE elaborate, it was to be simple, and to show how even a tiny, tiny program could seem smart. It was hard not to think it could be smarter if it were not so tiny, but that misses the point, which was about how easily we were confused, not about how much more effectively we could be confused if more energy were put in. So whether my DOCTOR or any other was making the right point was hard to say. My guess is not."
Here's the source for DOCTOR from ITS -- it has a much less extensive set of foul words and doesn't get insulted like his ANIMAL game does:
Doctor:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/src/games/doc.102
Guess the Animal:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/src/games/animal.1...
Animal has an extensive list of foul language words:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/src/games/animal.1...
I accidently offended it by earnestly trying to teach it to distinguish a bear from a pope, and it got mad at me, send angry email to KMP and I, and locked me out -- more details and pointers to Lisp code here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39414536
I finally sent KMP and ANIMAL an email sincerely apologizing, and apologized ANIMAL directly, and they forgave me so I could play again:
Apology Email:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/0f7d67997f9f5d30208e117e7...
HANDLE-FOUL-LANGUAGE:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/0f7d67997f9f5d30208e117e7...
RECEIVE-APOLOGY:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/0f7d67997f9f5d30208e117e7...
At least EMACS has thick skin and lets you type as many dirty words into it as you feel like.
by DonHopkins - Gnu Emacs Doctor actually recognizes RMS's name, and has canned responses for it.
So I fed his 1993 Kabuki-West Natalism Flame to it (the inappropriately announced baby in question is 33 years old now!):
http://www.art.net/studios/hackers/hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d...
>Are you annoyed that Stallman is emotionally stimulating?
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jwiegley/emacs-release/ref...
[...](set (make-local-variable 'doctor--stallmanlst) '(((doc$ doctor--describe) your (doc$ doctor--feelings-about) him \.) ((doc$ doctor--areyou) a friend of Stallman \?) ((doc$ doctor--bother) Stallman is (doc$ doctor--random-adjective) \?)
[...](set (make-local-variable 'doctor--rms-flag) nil)
[...](doctor-put-meaning rms 'rms) (doctor-put-meaning stallman 'rms);; I did not add this -- rms. ;; But he might have removed it. I put it back. --roland (defun doctor-rms () (cond (doctor--rms-flag (doctor-type (doc$ doctor--stallmanlst))) (t (setq doctor--rms-flag t) (doctor-type '(do you know Stallman \?)))))by DonHopkins - My favorite old AI named Tik-Tok - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tik-Tok_(novel)
>Tik-Tok finds that he can do as he pleases, and he secretly commits various hideous crimes for his amusement. After manipulating both robots and humans to cause chaos and bloodshed, Tik-Tok becomes wealthy (partly through health care privatization) and is finally elected Vice President of the United States.
by oidar - ...did Bytedance invent another Torment Nexus or was the name a coincidence?by kmeisthax
- Sounds like a topic for a ThePrimeagen reaction video.by bitwize
- Oh, that's much too low, Tik-Tok was elected President.by Mistletoe
- There is still work on symbolic and hybrid AI - ProbLog[1][2] and DeepProbLog[3], as well as DeepLog[4] for example.
[1] https://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/problog/
[2] https://github.com/ML-KULeuven/problog
by xvilka - The problem is that we have fuzzy data and concrete semantics, when what we really want is concrete data and fuzzy semantics.
What we really need is a new system of reason, where each expression implies meaning, and each meaning has implications; but where those implications don't have to be reducible to computable binary logic.
The problem with LLMs is that they are ignorant to their own implications. What follows from a prompt is not any system of reason: it's just a vague sense of familiarity. Even when we have them stumble through the topology of a logical deduction, they can only act out that logic as a vain performance.
Natural language is a system of relative subjects, each with subjective implications relative to the story. So far in computing, we have nothing remotely like that.
- More broadly, the field has been focused on inductive logic programming since the 90s. More or less, one can think of it like synthesizing a logic program to describe and generalize background knowledge and examples. An automated approach to building the knowledgebase of an expert system. It works disturbingly well, especially with modern approaches.by ux266478
- There is still work on symbolic and hybrid AI
A tremendous amount of work. The annual AGI Conference[1][2] was just a couple of weeks ago, and was the most heavily attended one in the event's history (which goes back about 19 years, IIRC). It was four days of presentations / papers / talks on various aspects of AGI, mostly not focused on LLM's. Not to mention dozens of posters which didn't merit a dedicated talk during the main conference.
And then you have the Neuro-symbolic Summer School[3] that's been running for the past few years, and also just recently took place for 2026.
To anybody not looking carefully, it might be easy to assume that LLM's have "taken all of the oxygen out of the room" with regards to AI. But dig a little deeper and one will find that there's still a lot of work going on pursuing other paths.
[1]: https://agi-conference.org/
by mindcrime