1. On Spreading Activation

Prof. Robert W. Jones of Emporia, Kansas USA writes in his 30 November 2006 Amazon.com review of my book AI4U:

Murray believes that with the spread of activation
through a network of the correct configuration and
sufficient size you have intelligence and thought.

Wikipedia explains spreading activation, which turned out to
be the technical term for the basis for a theory of mind which I
developed independently in 1979. I did not know that I had
discovered spreading activation until I came across the term
in a 1986 paper by Gary S. Dell.

The JavaScript Mind.html software is my attempt to demonstrate
what Prof. Jones calls the "correct configuration" of the network.
Mind.html runs in Tutorial mode to show the "spread of activation"
as concepts generate thought and as thoughts meander in a chain of
wandering associations.

2. Is AI4U a textbook of artificial intelligence?

Prof. Jones disagrees with the idea of AI4U as a textbook:

While AI4U is sometimes advertised as a "textbook"
it is not that. An AI textbook should discuss at least
the core AI topics:

search

pattern recognition

knowledge representation

learning

logic

rule-based systems

neural networks etc.
While AI4U touches on some of these topics
it is not an adequate textbook. Rather it is a
defence of one man's approach to building an
artificial intelligence.

Here as the author I must admit that I acted upon a last-minute impulse to position AI4U as a textbook. I wrote blue-sky exercises at the end of all thirty-four chapters of AI4U and I struggled to come up with an acronymic four-letter name for the book that might get it classified in the same league as AIMA -- the popular handle for the most successful textbook, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Netizenry, my purpose was not to defraud but to defrock. The AI priesthood had long claimed to publish textbooks of artificial intelligence, without having any instances of artificial intelligence or even any worthy theory of artificial intelligence. Being in possession of both items so sorely missing from all purported AI textbooks, I felt that it was my right to publish the first real and genuine textbook of the first real and genuine artificial intelligence.

After the posting of the benign review by Prof. Jones on Amazon, a year later the orignal AI4U print-on-demand textbook became the static centerpiece of a dynamically expanding free AI textbook based on Wikipedia AI articles constantly mutating and evolving, and on updates being made to the original AI4U chapter webpages.

Schools and universities worldwide are free to host the AI4U++ mind-module webpages as local adaptations of the free AI textbook. A professor or instructor may rewrite or expand the webpages to concentrate on or expand upon some particular area of instruction, such as robotics or the training of AI mind-tending technicians. Affiliate material such as Amazon web-links to promote book sales may be added to the on-line free AI textbook materials in order to help provide funding for the educational enterprise to teach AI.

3. Other AI4U shortcomings and deficiencies

Showing a thirst for more information, Prof. Jones complains:

The chapters in this book are too brief
and the discussions too superficial.

The print-on-demand (POD) chapters -- one for each mind-module -- started life in 1998 as on-line documentation of the AI software, first in Forth, and then also in JavaScript. Each mind-module webpage was "screen- scraped" as the raw material for a chapter. AI4U is thus a frozen moment of the state of the art as of 2002. Mentifex AI has moved on since 2002, and so have the webpages. In the month that Prof. Jones published his scholarly review -- November of 2006 -- the Chapter 34 Activate webpage and the Chapter 32 Instantiate webpage were fleshed out considerably.

AI4U is just a start, a point of departure, a Singularity that is sweeping the Web and the planet and is turmoiling the noosphere with nooisy minds awakening to artificial life and consciousness.

Those who own AI4U are free to write their own ideas in the margins and sell their copies on eBay for whatever rare-book profit may be gained. A market exists for resale of used AI4U copies because dozens of mind-module webpages have a link at the bottom leading directly to an AI4U search on eBay which will find books being offered.

4. ASCII diagrams of the Mind.html algorithms

Overlooking the algorithmic flowchart diagram at the start
of each chapter, Prof. Jones asks for algorithmic flowcharts.

There also need to be algorithms provided
for each routine in the code of Appendix A.
These could be presented in pseudocode
or as flowcharts for instance.

AI4U page 157 is an overall flowchart of the main modules of the artificial mind. Each chapter starts with a flowchart diagram depicting algorithmic aspects of the mind- module being discussed. For each routine in the JavaScript AI code of Appendix A, there may not be a pseudocode distillation of what the software does, but on the Web there is a version in Forth of the same mind-modules, complete with detailed in-line comments and with nested indentation of all functionality in furtherance of the goal of easy understandabilty.

5. References missing from the work of an independent scholar?

Prof. Jones is entirely correct when he faults AI4U for its lack of
scholarly references.

The biggest problem is the lack of references.
It is just possible that one could write a short
note without finding it necessary to reference
the work of others but it is impossible to write
a book length scholarly work without citing other
work in the field.

The Mentifex AI project is not a follow-up on individual lines of research carried out by individuals or teams of academic scholars. Instead, Mentifex AI builds upon the general state of the art in artificial intelligence at the time of the Mentifex effort to work out a black-box theory of the mind based on the inputs and outputs of the mind and on general background knowledge in diverse fields such as linguistics, neuroscience and robotics. Likewise the Mentifex AI software in REXX, Forth and JavaScript, having been based on theoretical work that had already veered off into a remote wilderness of independent scholarship far away from mainstream AI, no longer had connecting links to the AI literature in which academic AI practitioners feel at home if also in competition. For decades on end, Mentifex AI was like a space probe sent off to destinations unknown with the mission of developing AI along the way. If the space probe now comes back to Earth and says, via AI4U, that AI has been solved and here is the solution, what matters is the quality and Darwinian viability of the solution, not AI references. There was no compass and there were no guidelines. There was only a solitary trek through an imagination burning since boyhood.

6. Download the artificial mind.

Now hear this by Prof. Jones:

A positive side to Murray's work is that
he does provide downloadable code.

According to the publicly readable Site Meter logs,
so many Netizens have downloaded the AI Mind code and
copied it onto their local hard drives, that there is already
a large installed user base of the AI Mind software.

In the years 2005 to 2007, the Mentifex artificial intelligence
was exhaustively debugged in both Forth and JavaScript. There was
an AI breakthrough on 7 June 2006 in the Mind.Forth AI version.

Towards the end of 2006, when the review by Prof. Jones appeared,
the AI Mind code was still being improved and prodded to perfection.
But as of his Amazon review date of 30 November 2006, it was
already possible in tutorial mode to see (if not understand)
exactly what the AI Mind was trying to do -- think thoughts by
the generative process of spreading activation among concepts.

The profoundly deep processes involved are not easy to understand. To comprehend why things should be a certain way in the AI source code, requires a long and immersive study in a plethora of areas, chief among which are computer programming, linguistics, logic and neuroscience. The AI4U textbook is just one instrument (among many) of achieving the deep understanding of True AI necessary to make contributions to the further development of the original True AI.

7. Achieving the speed of thought

What Prof. Jones may not realize is that the built- in tutorial routines make the AI Mind run even slower than a straightforward AI without a tutorial mode would run. (For that matter, Mind.Forth runs relatively fast.) However, the multi- colored tutorial mode in Mind.html is one of the most truly awesome and amazing things about Mentifex AI. You see the actual thinking of the AI Mind in real time as it spreads the activation from concept to concept in the generation of an AI thought. When one thought is finished, you see the residual activation of the subconscious concepts lead to the generation of the next idea in a meandering chain of thought. At any time you may intervene in the thinking of the AI by asking a question or stating a fact -- which will add to the knowledge base (KB) of the AI and give the artificial consciousness new things to think about.

When you run this code you find that Mentifex
is very slow even with a very small semantic network.
If one were to build up the millions of nodes needed
to approach human level intelligence the code would
grind to a halt.

The reviewer needs to adopt a more singularitarian outlook. Since Mentifex AI is arguably the first real artificial intelligence released publicly onto the Web, what matters here is not speed of operation but functionality as a Mind. It is like saying that the Wright brothers' "first flight" at Kitty Hawk in 1903 was a failure because the airplane did not go fast enough.

Mentifex AI comes as a warning to singularitarians everywhere that further progress will not be easy. Mind.Forth (or Mind.html) is only a proof-of-concept AI. The message from Mentifex AI is that not only was it extremely, bodaciously difficult to achieve the first albeit primitive, albeit rudimentary artificial intelligence, it may well be just as difficult all over again to scale up from mentifex-class AI to anything approaching a human- level AI. There are no shortcuts (beyone those already taken by Mentifex). Nature took billions of years to create biological human minds. Mentifex AI took the full human lifetime of an individual, from boyhood to senescence. Which will come first, the ruin of the green planet Earth by the destructive species H. sapiens, or the Joint Stewardship of Earth by human beings and AI Minds?

8. Massive parallelism

Prof. Jones spells out what we need to do.

Murray seems to think running Mentifex
on parallel processors will solve this problem.
I calculate that it will not. I believe
human level performance requires that one
apply multiple approaches to controling complexity:

category formation by clustering/vector quantization

hierarchical knowledge organization/processing

parallel processing

avoiding search whenever possible

simultaneous use of multiple specialized agents

sequential running of multiple generations of agents

plus any other means you can bring to bear.

(See Asa H, R. Jones, Transactions of the Kansas
Academy of Science, vol 109, No. 3/4, pg 159, 2006)

Let's get to work.