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Baby computer learning to become an adult

Artificial intelligence is raising a computer, Hal, which it is hoped will grow up to speak as human. Anat Treister-Goren reads to him in Savyon near Tel Aviv. PHOTO: REUTERS

Meet Hal. Like any 18-month-old toddler, he likes bananas, toys and playing in the park. He especially enjoys bedtime stories.

But while other children are flesh and blood, Hal is actually a chain of algorithms -- a computer program that is being raised as a child and taught to speak through experiential learning in the same way as human children.

"He is a curious, very clever child, someone that always wants to know more," said neuro-linguist Anat Treister-Goren who is Hal's "mommy" and readily admits her attachment.

"Some kids are more predictable than others. He would be the surprising type," she said. Treister-Goren talks to Hal and reads him stories in much the same way a mother teaches her young child to learn about colors, food and animals.

"I build his world on daily basis," explained Treister-Goren.

She heads the training deparment at the Israeli-based Artificial Intelligence (AI), where she inputs information and language ability through conversations with Hal and works with computer experts who fine-tune his algorithms to enhance performance.

The privately owned company, which is run by Israeli high-tech entrepreneur Jack Dunietz, aims over the next 10 years to develop Hal into an "adult" computer program that can do what no program has ever done before -- pass the Turing test.

The British mathematician Alan Turing is one of the founders of computer science and the father of artificial intelligence. More than 50 years ago he predicted the advent of "thinking machines."

But in Turing's time, computers were slow and cumbersome devices, utterly incapable of fulfilling his vision.

Turing, who died in 1954, left behind the benchmark test for an intelligent computer -- it must fool a person into thinking it is human. No computer program has ever succeeded.

If, or when one does, it will open a Pandora's box of ethical and philosophical questions. After all, if a computer is perceived to be as intelligent as a person, what is the difference between a smart computer and a human being?

Today's chatbots -- a computer program that has a persona and a name and chats with you -- are incapable of dealing with changes in context or abstract ideas and succeed only at momentarily tricking people regurgitating pre-programmed answers.

But Hal has fooled child language experts into thinking he is a toddler with an understanding of about 200 words and a 50-word vocabulary which he uses in short, infantile sentences.

"Ball now park mommy," Hal tells Treister-Goren, then asks her to pack bananas for a trip to the park, adding that "monkeys like bananas", a detail he picked up from a story on animals in a safari park.

When Hal was "born", he was hardwired with nothing more than the letters of the alphabet and a preference for rewards -- a positive outcome -- over punishments -- a negative one.

The pre-programmed preference for rewards makes Hal strive for a correct response. Treister-Goren corrects Hal's mistakes in her typewritten conversations with him, an action Hal is programmed to recognize as a punishment and avoids repeating.

Named after the smooth-spoken computer Hal 9000 from the science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the scientists and language specialists at AI see Hal as the first step towards the computer of the movie.

"All of us strongly believe that machines are the next step in evolution," said Dunietz. "The distinction between real flesh and blood, old-fashioned and the new kind, will start to blur."

Dunietz's ambition is to develop a computer that functions as an assistant, doing all sorts of time-consuming chores. Going to Japan for a holiday? The computer will book your ticket, choose your seat on the plane, organize a hotel and arrange for a rental car to await you at the airport.

"We can have a personal assistant, a slave, a friend who doesn't really suffer by being delegated these tasks," Dunietz said.

You will not need a mouse or keyboard to operate the computer as it will function when you converse with it.

"It is going to be the next user interface, the last user interface," Dunietz said, explaining that it will replace the mouse, computer pointing devices and the Microsoft Windows environment.

"Machines will be extremely human-like in many respects and particularly the most important respect which is the ability to communicate like humans," Dunietz said.

For years intelligent computers have featured in Hollywood productions such as Star Trek and most recently in Steven Spielberg's AI Artificial Intelligence, a film about a robot boy called David who dreams of being human.

But intelligent machines have remained the domain of science fiction books and movies even though AI's chief scientist Jason Hutchens believes the computer technology of today is powerful enough to produce artificially intelligent computers.

"It's just that we don't know the secret yet," said Hutchens, an Australian who won the prestigious Loebner artificial intelligence prize in 1996. "Our goal is the holy grail of artificial intelligence, it's to get a computer program that can use language," he said. The idea is to educate Hal gradually, the way a child learns, through trial-and-error and rewards when he performs well.

Hutchens believes that it will take about a decade to develop Hal's language and communications skills from that of a toddler to an adult.
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