>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.
Vintage Artificial Intelligence: Before It Got Awkward (blog.archive.org)
73 pointsby signor_bosco8 hours ago16 comments
oidar 6 hours ago
My favorite old AI named Tik-Tok - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tik-Tok_(novel)
Mistletoe 4 hours ago
Oh, that's much too low, Tik-Tok was elected President.
bitwize 4 hours ago
Sounds like a topic for a ThePrimeagen reaction video.
kmeisthax an hour ago
...did Bytedance invent another Torment Nexus or was the name a coincidence?
ripe 5 hours ago
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".
DonHopkins 4 hours ago
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 \?)))))jonbaer 7 hours ago
DonHopkins 4 hours ago
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...
mikestorrent 37 minutes ago
Ahh VRML was pretty cool. The problem was that the VRML viewer plugins were slow, needed more RAM than anyone had, or needed to run Java and so you'd let the 486 kick that off and go get a snack and come back and it would still be thrashing the disk to swap hard enough to have a chance to start anything. Pity that they didn't get some demoscene guys to make an efficient implementation.
I had this ancient program called Virtual Homespace Builder https://archive.org/details/hmebuilder that was like an early Sketchup sorta thing and it would render VRML output, but I can't say as I ever managed to publish anything with it, being a young whelp at the time.
If VRML had been fast and efficient, something like Second Life / Metaverse might have emerged there...
jonbaer 4 hours ago
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.
ironqcold 5 hours ago
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 impressive
classichasclass 5 hours ago
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.
ForOldHack 8 hours ago
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."
quuxplusone 3 hours ago
And that book is (naturally enough) borrowable on archive.org. :)
https://archive.org/details/policemansbeardi0000unse/page/n2...
mikestorrent 36 minutes ago
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"
DonHopkins 5 hours ago
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.