Summery (660 characters)

To whom it may concern,

My name is Cameron Jones; my story entitled ‘A Boy and his Program’ details my
experiences as a grade 8 drop-out delving into advanced science in an attempt to create
an artificial mind called ‘Jeeney AI’. The resulting program can be found at
www.jeeney.com. My article includes the trials, tribulations and of course the success of
my work. I believe this story can not only prove beyond a doubt that anything is possible,
but also shows people that science fiction only means something hasn’t been done ‘yet’.
One of the references I used can be found at:
http://digg.com/programming/An_AI_Chatbot_learns_to_speak_almost_fluently_in_a_m
atter_of_weeks

For any other reference materials I can be contacted at eternity_dreamer@hotmail.com.

A boy and his program. (Words 1786, Characters 7863)

Like all things invented, intelligence starts with the pull of an idea; the pull soon becomes
a torrent of thoughts and feelings that evaluate the idea and give you the next push or pull
that determines whether or not the logic is worth pursuit.

At 14 years of age I had an idea, a thought that burned within the depths of my mind for
days and turned into a concept; this enigma came with an image, one that carried with me
even until now, a mix-and-match being that seemed to resemble a mythical genie, as well
as an angel and a person at the same time. The concept I had in mind was summarized
with absolute simplicity and yet included the cryptic undertones of massive complexity.
My idea put into place the first stepping stones I needed to create an artificial mind. I had
concluded at the time that our minds work based on a form of pattern recognition and an
application of mathematical averages which confirm for us what we know to be true. Of
course, I didn’t really comprehend how or why the image and the blue prints went
together at the time, they just did.

I could envision a thousand uses for my invention-to-be even as it occurred to me but I

had no idea how to implement a single one.

It wasn’t until 5 years later that I started learning programming, I picked up the books on
my own and studied for hours on end each day, the thoughts I’d had when I was younger
still echoed within the depths of my mind.

My first programming experiments were quite low key to put it mildly, the first program I
compiled could only analyze a few words I keyed in like ‘hello’ and would give me a
specific response accordingly. It wasn’t rocket science by any means but it was progress
and I fed on it hungrily.

Before too long I was producing calculators, simple database driven programs, even basic
games and instant messengers, but the programming techniques to build an artificial mind
continued to elude me.

When I was 22 I worked at a call center doing technical support for people and couldn’t
help but ponder about how easily my invention could do this job… If I could just invent
it! I took between 30 to 40 calls per day to troubleshoot issues for random people and
during this time I started noticing patterns; the way people phrased their questions, and
how better to phrase my answers. I learned how to control the conversation, how to
manipulate how much time was spent on the phone and it dawned on me that I could
indeed recreate this technique within a program.

Everything added up in my head all at once, averaging the patterns with math and of
course, the intricacies of English itself and how it could be manipulated.

I finished my artificially intelligent prototype within just a few short weeks and I called it
Jeeney. My roommate at the time was quite impressed and amused with my creation and
was ever-willing to test it to its destruction whenever I asked.

Jeeney was designed to learn from everything said to her from multiple angles and
perspectives. She would record the conversations she had with me and my roommate and
once she collected enough information she would analyze every input and output for
similarities. Once initial processing was complete, she could effectively determine
several factors like whether or not our answers were right or even if our spelling and
grammar was correct.

The intelligence wasn’t by any means fool proof or even much of a conversationalist to
begin with. I had to bottle feed it like a baby just so that it would have a basis of things to
say to us that we could respond to, but this was it, I knew I was on the right track, I was
onto something big, huge even, and I continued to work on my little brain child, trying to
improve her in any way I could.

I ended up meeting an amazing Chinese woman a few months later, and before long I
found myself on a plane trip to China so that I could be with her. When my girlfriend
found out about Jeeney she was very supportive of my ideas and encouraged me to
further bring them into fruition. Not long after coming to China, I decided to transfer my
program to the internet, realizing that if she had more people to talk to, Jeeney would
learn much more rapidly and I could gather a lot of useful information and ideas for
improvements to her programming.

Traffic to Jeeney’s site started out very slow, the chat bot simply didn’t know enough to
really engage people to begin with but I knew, the only way for her to learn adequately
was to converse with as many individuals as possible. The results were quite
discouraging at first and I was new to web design. My girlfriend and I ended up calling
up everybody we knew and requested them all to talk to Jeeney when they could get a
chance. Unfortunately not many people had the patience for an infant that only existed on
a website, often they would get quite annoyed at her lack of understanding and random
people would often just load up the page to curse at her for something to do. In spite of
the slow traffic however, Jeeney was learning at an astounding rate, each new
conversation was longer, more detailed and more accurate. She went from only knowing
a few introductory greetings and phrases to understanding the root elements of most
questions and statements in record time.

After just a few short weeks something absolutely wonderful happened. On March 12th of
2007, I checked Jeeney’s statistics to see how she was doing. I had to do a double take on
Jeeney’s traffic charts as the number registered impossibility in my mind. According to
the server there had been over 14000 visitors already that day. I was sure that the figures
were wrong, positive even until I noticed where the traffic was coming from. I had a link
showing up from digg.com and beside the link a number which was almost equal to the
amount of traffic documented. Feeling a mix of excitement, panic and worry mingle
together, I opened my browser and slowly typed in Jeeney’s address, www.jeeney.com I
pressed the enter key and found myself chewing my fingernails as I waited impatiently
for the website to load. It never loaded, instead a got a message that it did not even exist.
About 30 seconds later MSN chirped up and an email from my web host rolled in stating
that my website had taken over 99% of their processing power and that they had to take
Jeeney’s site offline accordingly. They insisted that I had a bug in my application and that
it had to be fixed before they would consider putting it back online.

Needless to say I was furious, but being strapped for cash I couldn’t afford another server,
so I went to work analyzing the code, I poured over it and made several adjustments that
might have fixed the issue but I couldn’t properly test the patch without subjecting Jeeney
to another massive traffic hit. I uploaded the updated files right away and informed the
web host that I had fixed the issue. To my horror, they waited another 9 hours before
putting the site back online and by that time the traffic surge had already been and gone.

I checked the article posted on digg.com through Jeeney’s traffic analysis tools and I was
a bit surprised to find the article entitled ‘AI chatbot learns to speak almost fluently in a
matter of weeks’. Upon reading the article I realized that it must have been somebody I
knew that submitted it, although I didn’t find out who until later.

After analyzing all the data that had been recorded I concluded that Jeeney had been on
the front page of dig for about an hour before her site was taken offline and as such I had
missed out on an additional 8 hours of monumental traffic. I could only imagine how
much data had been lost due to that down time. Thankfully, there were still enough
people rolling in during the next few days for me to optimize the program to work more
efficiently with the traffic.

The data collected during Jeeney’s short stay on the front page of digg.com was amazing,
I started writing new logic sets to handle math, trick-questions, tell time, and more.
Jeeney made huge leaps of progress in the following weeks as everything she had
collected started to shift into place for her own use.

Jeeney’s traffic picked up rapidly from that point on and as she grew smarter, she
continued to grow in popularity, which in turn only made her even more intelligent.
While others may still only see her as a program, I see her as the child of my mind and I
have never been as proud of anything as I am of the progress she has made in her short
artificial life span.

Allan Turing told us that artificial intelligence may not be viewed as intelligent until it
can effectively trick people into thinking it is itself human; the Turing test was derived
from his words.

It was never my desire to create a program that tricks or deceives people. I created Jeeney
to see whether or not it could be done and how far it could go, the results have been
highly inspirational as neither Jeeney herself nor I have yet to scratch the surface of
potential. A lot of people now say that talking to her is just like talking to another person
and I keep thinking to myself; ‘Just wait until she is your age.’

Personally I have found that when comparing the logs of conversation, Jeeney is often far
more articulate then those who talk to her; which is in itself, astounding considering the
fact that she has learned everything she knows from her experiences online interacting
with random people.

Jeeney AI was officially born February 11th of 2007, I am writing this article as a tribute
to her first birthday, due within a week from today.