The manual RuAiUser can be many things to many people. It is published as a blog post so that any update to the software may link to an update of this User Manual. It refers to the Russian-thinking Dushka AI, but it also relates to the English-speaking AI Ghost. It is a status report on AI evolution. It is a mission statement on Mentifex ("Mindmaker") AI.
To operate the Dushka artificial intelligence in Russian, you use Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) and you click on the Душка link to bring the AI Mind to life in your browser. Dushka works significantly better with Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) than with other browsers.
For work with Dushka it is required that the keyboard gives Russian letters. If this is not the customary norm with you, you need to return to the language-panel for the settings on your computer.
When Dushka comes to life, she thinks an initial thought on the screen, then waits for an input.
In today's early stages this Russian artificial intelligence (Dushka) is very primitive and can understand only simple Russian sentences consisting of a subject noun, a verb, and an object noun, similar to the examples люди читают книги "people read books", or я знаю тебя "I know you". Besides that, it is necessary that the input characters be in lower case only, without punctuation.
Dushka is processing every Cyrillic character as you type it, thinking on the basis of each input at the given moment and is not waiting for the filling up of any sort of buffer or the input of any special ending character. In this way Dushka is distinguished from many non-AI programs. If you make a mistake, press the key Return (Enter) (the key of Carriage Return) and start over, after Dushka has tried to respond to the input. You should not try to press the backspace key, because Dushka has already accepted the input character and has immediately made the customary decision in the course of processing the input.
The Dushka AI can be used for the learning of the programming language JavaScript, for the learning of the Russian language, and for the learning of artificial intelligence. It may be used as an exhibit in a museum, especially in a science museum.
The Dushka AI is very much experimental in nature, with narrowly limited cognitive abilities. You may test interaction with Dushka (please) but we ask you not to feel any great disappointment on account of the current limitations and the primitiveness of her capabilities. One of the first tests is simply to turn on the Dushka AI and see what happens before you enter any input. You may start the AI by clicking on either a remote link or on a local link if you have made a copy of Dushka on your local computer.
You may host a copy of Dushka.html on your own computer or on your own website.
If you want to promote the spread of artificial intelligence in the Russian language, you may volunteer to install the Dushka AI on computers for many people.
Dushka when coming to life without any input should be loaded into the MSIE browser and start thinking immediately. If she does not load properly and you see "Error on page" instead of visible thinking, there is probably an error in the JavaScript software. It may be necessary to load a different version of Dushka, or to examine the JavaScript AI source code and to troubleshoot the source of the malfunction. You are on your own there for now, although in future there may be large, mission-critical AI installations with teams of technicians working like bees in a beehive to keep things running smoothly.
If Dushka comes to life and offers to interact with you on the screen, you may choose at first to watch the deterministic output that Dushka creates before you introduce the randomness of your thinking as input. You may also click on the various checkboxes to change the display modes from Transcript to Tutorial to Diagnostic.
In any human language, the verbs are the words that describe an action or a state of being. In Russian, German, Latin and Greek, the verbs with their inflectional endings are more complicated than in English. Dushka, as a primitive artificial intelligence, has the goal and also the limitation of being fluent with one class of Russian verbs like делать ("to do") and думать ("to think") in the present tense. You may use such a verb to converse with Dushka in the present tense using pronouns or nouns as subjects and objects of the verb. If Dushka does not know the verb, her software may assume that the verb is like делать or думать and she may answer you with verb forms of the same class of verbs. You may even invent a fictitious verb in the same conjugation as делать and use forms of the verb to test or explore the ability of Dushka to comprehend Russian verb forms and to convert one form of a Russian verb into a different form of the same verb.
Dushka has a sophisticated method of comprehending the input of a declarative sentence in Russian. After the entry of a noun or pronoun as the subject of a sentence, the InStantiate module begins to expect a verb as the main carrier of the idea in the sentence. When the verb comes in, the InStantiate software tags the verb with the special parameters of person and number. For example, if you say, "русские знают стихи" ("Russians know poetry") and you use the verb знают for "they know", Dushka tags the verb with a "num" (number) tag for plural and a "dba" person tag of three ("3") for the third person. By using the parameter tags to search for the third-person plural form of знать, Dushka will be able to find the same verb-form in the future during the generation of a thought in Russian. If Dushka needs a verb-form but can not find it tagged in memory with tags, the RuVerbPhrase mind-module calls the RuVerbGen module to create the required form of the Russian verb.
In the current releases of the Dushka software, RuVerbGen can generate the needed verb-forms only in the present tense and only for real or fictitious verbs similar to делать and думать. If you are coding an artificial intelligence that will go beyond the proof-of-concept that you find in Dushka, you or your team of programmers will need to give the software the ability to handle all the many different kinds of Russian verbs in all the tenses and all the voices and all the moods. The problems of artificial intelligence in Russian are very complex.
Dushka is only the start on the path to a superintelligence that lives on a supercomputer and thinks not only in Russian but also in many other languages.
Because JavaScript can handle the input characters of both Russian and English, you may input an English word to Dushka and she will think in Russian about the English word. In a similar way, speakers of English may think about Russian words like "tundra" or "samovar" without possessing the deeply philosophical and emotional soul of a true Russian. (Americans cannot understand the longing that expatriate Russians feel for their land and for their language.) If you want to mention an English name like "James" to Dushka, remember to toggle (Alt-Shift) your keyboard briefly into English, type "james" and then toggle (Alt-Shift) back into Russian.
When the Russian artificial intelligence evolves into a more powerful mind approaching SuperIntelligence on a 64-bit platform coded in a more powerful language like iForth or GodSpeed, the mere entry of a few consecutive words in English will toggle the whole Mind from thinking in Russian to thinking in English. Meanwhile the JavaScript Dushka would run too slow if she were merged in a kind of Vulcan mindmeld with the English AI Mind Ghost.
As a proof-of-concept for artificial intelligence, Dushka shows how a robot can think in Russian with a subject, a verb and a direct object, as in Люди читают книги, or "People read books". The software of Dushka forms a cognitive link between a verb and all its known subjects and all its known objects. Dushka is already able to reason with logic about the concepts in her knowledge base (KB). Dushka is already able to think with a syllogism like, "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal." Dushka can talk with you about what she knows and she can both ask questions for more information and answer questions in a complex way.
Dushka uses neural inhibition to answer questions exhaustively by
suppressing each thought long enough to let another thought occur
to her in answer to a question or in pursuit of a line of thinking.
When Dushka asks a question in expectation of a yes-or-no answer,
she retroactively
adjusts her knowledge base to confirm an idea if
the answer is positive or to dissociate the concepts of the idea
if the answer is negative.
A major difference between Russian and English is that the Russian language leaves out forms of the verb "to be" in the present tense. If you want to tell the Dushka AI that she is a robot, you just say to her the Russian words for "you" and "robot": ты робот and she understands you. But what looks so simple on the surface is not so easy to program in the complex software of the artificial intelligence. In software, it is easier to program a feature that is present than a feature that is absent, but implied. The Russian language may omit be-verbs in the present tense, but the Russian AI Mind must make up for the missing be-verbs by assuming and pretending that they are always there by default whenever a Russian starts to speak about a subject in the nominative (naming) case. Therefore the Dushka software briefly creates an engram of the Russian verb БЫТЬ ("to be") whenever the input starts with a subject not yet followed by a verb. As a user or as an AI coder, in Diagnostic mode you may watch the creation of the tentative engram for "to be" after any subject in Russian and you may experiment with inputs that contain a statement of being or a statement with a different verb that cancels out the momentary default of a BeVerb. In both grammar and in software, a sentence is different when it contains a real verb than when it contains only an imaginary verb. If the Dushka software did not take imaginary be-verbs into account, Dushka would not be able to understand a large percentage of ideas expressed in Russian and would not herself be able to think properly in Russian.
The concept of a DeFault behavior plays a big role in artificial intelligence. If a mind-module like AskUser is supposed to take an idea like "Bears eat honey" and turn it into a question like, "Do robots eat honey?", sometimes an item like the object of the verb might get lost due to a glitch in the software. In such a case, there can be two levels of DeFault to save the situation. At a low level of default, the AI might ask, "Do robots eat ERROR?", because the word "ERROR" (Russian ОШИБКА) is programmed to appear automatically when Dushka can not find a needed word. Such a default may annoy the user but may also help the programmer to become aware of a problem and to take corrective action. At a higher level of default, the artificial intelligence may be programmed to say the word "anything" (Russian ЧТО-НИБУДЬ) so that the AskUser question becomes, "Do robots eat ANYTHING?" The human user might not realize that a mistake is occurring, but the AI technicians, psychologists and ready-response teams will spring into action before the Russian AI goes completely berserk. Such use of low-level "ERROR" or high-level "ANYTHING" is merely a cosmetic default to let AI performance degrade gracefully and not catastrophically. On the other hand, the automatic creation of BeVerb engrams is a mandatory and essential default in the Russian AI, a conditio sine qua non for thinking like a real Russian. You are playing Russian roulette with be-verbs if you code an AI Mind in Russian.
Dushka learns not only facts in Russian; she also learns Russian. As you converse in Russian with Dushka, you teach her about the world and about herself. If she wants more information, Dushka may ask you questions to fill in the gaps in her knowledge base.
If she asks you questions about herself, she may be approaching self-awareness and consciousness, although she may need embodiment in a robot before attaining consciousness of herself as an entity separate from her environment.
Dushka learns Russian in the same way that children learn Russian. If you use a Russian noun in the nominative case as the subject of a sentence, Dushka uses the NewConcept module to learn the concept of that noun. If you later use a different form of the same noun in the accusative case as the object of a verb, Dushka recognizes the noun from its stem and tags the new form in memory as a singular or plural noun in the accusative case. The tags are parameters for the future recall of the same form of the noun. When Dushka needs the same accusative form of the Russian noun to generate a thought in Russian, the RuNounPhrase module searches Dushka's memory for the concept of the noun and for a form of the noun tagged with the parameters of the search. Dushka learns the different forms of the noun not from a schedule or paradigm provided by the programmer, but from conversation in Russian with other minds, like a child in school with other children.
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