Are AI Chatbots intelligent?

 

"A chatbot as a mouth on the screen of a mobile phone"

Will chatbots based on the large language model lead to advancd general artificial intelligence?

Or are we heading towards another AI winter?

In his latest post, What if Generative AI turned out to be a Dud? Gary Marus questions the very high levels of investment in the latest developments and he suggests that the possible return on investment has been over-hyped. He quotes an article from Fortune:

Perhaps we should go back to first principles and look at the foundations of human intelligence. and see how ChatGPT relates to them. by considering the flow of cultural information.

MicroCODIL

             

Most of the CODIL research was carried out on mainframe computers which have long been retired from service, but in the early 1980s it was decided to produce a demonstration version, in the form of an educational package that would work on a BBC Micro - which was a popular hobby minicomputer which was used widely in schools and over 1.5 million were produced. The result was MicroCODIL. A large number of BBC microcomputers have survived (typically several are advertised at any one time on eBay) the package can still be run to demonstrate MicroCODIL and how it provides a transparent human-friendly framework.

The Syntax of CODIL

In the  CODIL interpreters  information about the tasks being executed  is mapped from the CODIL text onto a table which represent a map of a recursive network where each node in the network represents a set or a partition of a set.  To keep the human interface the syntax is a simple as possible and it is not concerned about the conventional distinction between "program" and "data".

 

CODIL is best understood in similar way to a symbolic assembly language designed to work on a recursive network.  A conventional symbolic language  consists of  simple lists of commands mapped onto successive cells in an array.  However each command has a syntax structure which includes an explicit instruction and control and/or address information.

 

How the CODIL model was developed,

A detailed paper discussing the theory underlying CODIL, and it relevance to modelling the human brain and its connections with more conventional computing models is being drafted.  This post summaries the main issues to be included in that paper.

 

CODIL started in the 1960's and is best understood as a research project to develop an "interactive electronic" clerk that could work symbiotically with humans in the context of very large organisations and management information systems.  The key requirement was that the clerk used the human terminology to describe the task, was fully transparent and could, if asked, explain what it was doing. There was no explicit attempt to model human intelligence, but the hope would be that the human/computer partnership would be more effective than humans working alone.   The current reassessment of the original research, interpreted in terms of a network, suggests CODIL unintentionally  reversed engineered some aspects of how the human brain stores and processes information and supports intelligence. It is therefore not surprising the CODIL system uses a very different model of information processing to the stored program computer model based on the pioneering work of Turing and Von Neumann.

 

If we go back to first principles any observer of the real world will have an incomplete and uncertain view of the surrounding environment, whether the observer is a small animal (human ancestor) with a primitive brain eons ago, a human adult, or a large social organisation. In 2002 Donald Rumsfeld described the importance of real world uncertainty in a large organisation :

Should a computer system which does not understand be described as intellegent?

 

Gary Marcus from Marcus on AI produces an excellent newsletter which has been consideri0ng recent AI graphic and video demonstrations and looking at their limitations. The above picture is from an AI generated video of a monkey playing chess.

Before continuing take a good look at the picture and decide what aspects of the picture shows a lack of understanding by the AI which drew it.

Histories of the Internet

Archives of IT inaugural Forum on the Histories of the Internet 2024

On 9 January 2024 AIT held the first of an annual series of forums on the histories of the internet and our networked digital society.  Below you can read the talks by a multi-disciplinary set of academics, practitioners and leaders from civil society, business, industry, and government.

The Experiences of a Human Chatbot (Cooper Technical Bureau. 1962-1965)

In my first job I was employed as graduate level clerk providing what could be considered to be a human "chatbot" service to technical management in a research organization (The Cooper Technical Bureau) of an international company (Cooper. MacDougal & Robertson, later part of the Wellcome Foundation). The information department acted as a combined library and mail room for technical correspondence and my job, as a member of a small team, was to ensure that management (both in the UK and overseas) were fully informed of issues which could affect the development of the veterinary and insecticidal products that we sold worldwide. As such I was taking information from manually indexed text documents and providing summary repost and answers to question. I was also involved in integrating new information into the existing paper archives.

Draw an office with the far wall being a large window through which can clearly be seen two or three ostriches in an African savannah landscape. In the office a man is sitting at a desk writing, with a small pile of papers beside him. On the other side of the office there is a four-draw filing cabinet and books in a bookcase.

TANTALIZE - A heuristic problem solver written in CODIL

 

 

The New Scientist magazine published the following news item on 21 August 1975

For those who have trouble solving the Tantalizers that run each week in New Scientist, Dr Chris Reynolds of Brunel University has developed a computer programme.

"I'm sorry it can be done," commented Martin Hollis, a philosopher at the University of East Anglia, who creates the Tantalizer each week. "The best puzzles are the ones which are too elusive for a computer."

TANTALIZER 226

 

The picture was generated by AI using the description "A school girl wearing an orange blazer which has a pink badge on the pocket. The girl is wearing a turquoise hat and a khaki scarf. Her skirt is black"

SCHOOL COLOURS

 

TELL ME, PROFERROR PINHOLE, WHICH SCHOOL DOES YOUR DAUGHTER ALICE GO TO.

 

LET ME THINK.

 IS IT THE ONE WITH THE ORANGE HAT AND THE TURQUOISE SCARF?

OR WITH THE KHARKI BLAZER AND THE ORANGE EMBLEM?

OR WITH THE PINK BLAZER AND THE ORANGE SCARF?

OR WITH THE KHARKI SCARF AND PINK EMBLEM?

OR WITH THE KHAKI HAT AND TURQUOISE EMBLEM?

I FEAR I CANNOT RECOLLECT.

 

GOOD HEAVENS. PROFESSOR, HOWEVER MANY SCHOOLS ARE THERE?

 

JUST FOUR AND I HAVE ONE DAUGHTER AT EACH.

BETH GOES TO ST GERTRUDE'S

CLARE WEARS  A TURQUIOSE HAT AND

DEBBIE WEARS A KHARKI EMBLEM.

ST ETHELREDA'S FLAUNTS A PINK SCARF,

ST FAITH'S AN ORANGE BLAZER AND

ST IDA'S A PINK HAT.

 

ANE WHOSE ARE THOSE CLOTHES FLUNG DOWN ON THE FLOOR OVER THERE?

 

THE TURQUOISE HAT AND THE KHARKI BLAZER BELONG TO DIFFERENT GIRLS.

AS FOR THE TURQUOISE BLAZER, WELL I THINK YOU MIGHT WORK THAT OUT FOR YOURSELF."

Author Martin Hollis

Published in the New Scientist

 

More information about  TANTALIZE - a heuristic problem solver written in CODIL

Try and solve the puzzle yourself before seeing how TANTALIZE solves it.

Exchanging information about CODIL and related topics

 

The purpose of this blog is to encourage the change of information of information about CODIL, the underlying theory and its relation to human and artificial intelligence.  It will also be concerned with the history of the CODIL project and the problems of providing support for unconventional "blue sky" ideas, especially when the person who has those ideas is neurodiverse. Constructive criticism is alway welcome - as such criticism is at the heart of all healthy scientific research.

Transparency, CODIL, and the Horizon "black box" Software

 

One of the biggest difficulties faced by chatbots and other AI packages based on large language models is that they are black box systems which lack transparency. The same difficulty can also apply to large conventionally programmed commercial applications where the lack of transparency can have serious consequences. This problem has been spectacularly demonstrated by the problems caused by the General Post Office's Horizon software where innocent postmasters ended in prison because of errors in the "black box" software. Part of the problem was that the courts were prepared to accept as reliable "evidence" from a complex "black box" system which was unable to answer questions about the origins or reliability of the evidence it was being provided.

Trapped by the Box (Blog)

 In reading this blog you will links taking you to blogs  I no longer have access to due to antique software and lost passwords, in part due to a serious computer failure and a failure in keeping proper backed up records. 

 

AI generated pictures

As I have aphantasis I am not good a drawing images because I have aphantasia I cannot inagine what they would look like - but I can describe them in words.  As a result I have used Bing to create images from a word description and used the results in the earlier blog posts. I found some of the results very impressive - but when I came to the post "What is CODIL" the AI package demonstrated how little it understands what it is doing. I simply asked for a picture of a laptop with the word "CODIL" on the screen. This completely floored it and however I reworded the request it usually used the word "COIL" or "COLL". So I repeated the request for a picture of a shop front with someone standing outside, with the name "CODIL" and it offered three pictures of a shop called "CODE" and this interesting variation.

The Hype associated with early AI research

‘Did the Hype Associated with Early AI Research Lead to Alternative Routes Towards Intelligent Interactive Computer Systems Being Overlooked?’

By Chris Reynolds, chris@codil.co.uk 

Introductory statements for panel  session "AI – Future Realities" chaired by John Handby at "Archives of IT Forum on the Histories of the Internet,"  London, 9 January 2024

Artificial Intelligence research has involved chasing one heavily funded and overhyped  paradigm after another, with intervening AI winters. A study of the commercially unsuccessful projects can tell you a lot about the economic and political environment that decided which projects should get funded and which would be abandoned, 

A Possible Model of the Brain's Symbolic Assembly Language?

 On 26-27th September 2022 the Royal Society, London, held a discussion meeting on "Cognitive Artificial Intelligence" at which the following poster was displayed:

A summary of the publications covering the original CODIL research

General Introduction and the Software Interpreters

CODIL started as the symbolic assembly language of an unconventional computer processor design, proposed in 1967, where the aim was to produce a "white box" system which would work symbiotically with people in the field of non-numerical information processing applications. The hardware was never built but four different software interpreters were written which have shown that the approach was feasible, and would support a wide variety of applications. The four versions of the interpreter were as follows:

Could CODIL model how the brain processes information because I have aphantasia?

 On the 18th January 2024 the Aphantasia Foundation published the following note onto LinkedIn  which is very relevant to this question.

What is CODIL?

 

CODIL (COntext Dependent Information Language) is an early (1960s) experimental human-computer interaction language which was originally based on first-hand experience working on a 100% manual international  management information system handling research and development correspondence for a veterinary subsidiary of the Wellcome Foundation, followed by a period of programming and systems analysis on one of the largest sales accounting batch-processing computer system of the period, involving several LEO III computers handling sales for the oil marketing company Shell-Mex & BP. At the time many computer manufacturers were planning for the first generation of computers which hopefully could support integrated management systems with user terminals.