Category: Programming

A long time ago I wrote about the Loebner Prize, and how it seemed like this competition isn’t so much a test of machine intelligence, but rather a test of how well the programmers can fool the judges into thinking they’re talking to a human. Not that anyone has actually done this successfully – none of the judges have ever been convinced that any of the chatbots were really a human, and the annual “winner” of the Prize is decided by sympathy points awarded by some very charitable judges.

In that previous post, I remember being struck by how little has changed in the quality of the chatbots that are entered into this competition: it hadn’t improved since the inception of the prize. So, today I thought I’d randomly “check in” on how the chatbots are doing, and read the chat transcripts from the competition from more recent years. (I encourage you to read the transcripts for yourself, to get a taste of the “state of the art” of today’s chatbots.)

And can you guess how they’re doing? Of course you can: they still haven’t improved  by any margin, except perhaps a larger repertoire of cleverly crafted catch-all responses. Even the winner and close runner-up of the 2017 competition are comically robotic, and can be effortlessly pegged as artificial by a human judge.

My goal in this post, however, is not to bash the authors of these chatbots – I’m sure they’re competent developers doing the best they can. My goal is to discuss why chatbot technology hasn’t moved forward since the days of ELIZA. (Note: When I refer to chatbots, I’m not referring to today’s virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa, which have made big strides in a different way, but rather to human-approximating, Turing-test-passing machines, which these chatbots attempt to be.)

I think much of it has to do with a lack of corporate support. Chatbots have never really found a good business use case, so we haven’t seen any major companies devote significant resources to chatbot development. If someone like Google or Amazon had put their weight behind this technology, we might have seen an advancement or two by now. Instead, the competitors in the Loebner Prize still consist of individual hobbyists and hackers with no corporate backing.

Interest in chatbots seems to have peaked around 2012, when the cool thing was to add a customized bot to your website and let it talk to your users, but thankfully this died down very shortly thereafter, because apparently people prefer to communicate with other people, not lame attempts at imitation. We can theorize that someday we may hit upon an “uncanny valley” effect with chatbots, where the conversation is eerily close to seeming human (but not quite), which will cause a different kind of revulsion, but we’re still very far from that point.

Another thing to note is the actual technology behind today’s (and yesterday’s) chatbots. Most of these bots, and indeed all the bots that have won the Loebner Prize in recent years, are constructed using a language called AIML, which is a markup language based on XML. Now, there have been plenty of ways  that people have  abused and misused XML in our collective memory, but this has to be one of the worst! AIML attempts to augment XML with variables, stacks, macros, conditional statements, and even loops. And the result is an  unwieldy mess that is completely unreadable and unmaintainable. If chatbot technology is to move forward, this has to be the  first thing to throw out and replace with something more modern.

And finally, building a chatbot is one of those endeavors that seems tantalizingly simple on the surface: if you look at the past chat logs of the prize-winning bots, it’s easy to think to yourself, “I can build a better bot than that!” But, once you actually start to think seriously about building a bot that approximates human conversation, you quickly come up against research-level problems like natural language processing, context awareness, and of course human psychology, behavior, and consciousness in general. These are most definitely not problems that can be solved with XML markup. They likely can’t even be solved with today’s neural networks and “deep learning” algorithms. It will probably require a quantum leap in AI technology. That is, it will require building a machine that is truly intelligent in a more general way, such that its conversations with humans are a by-product of its intelligence, instead of its primary goal.

For now, however, the dream of chatbots has been laid to rest in the mid-2010s, and will probably not come back until the technology allows it, and until they’re actually wanted or needed.

I’m a bit late to the party in starting to tinker with TensorFlow, but nevertheless I’ve been having some product ideas (some dumber than others) for real-world applications of machine learning, and here’s one of the stupider ones:

If you know me at all, you know that one of my hobbies is foraging for wild mushrooms. Going to the forest to forage for mushrooms is a time-honored tradition in Russia and many other Slavic countries.  I also derive great pleasure from sharing this hobby with other people, and telling them how fun, challenging, and rewarding this activity can be.

Therefore, I give you –  MushroomHuntr: an Android app that can identify different varieties of mushrooms!  It uses a neural network to perform image recognition in real time, to tell you what kind of mushroom you’re looking at.

Huge legal disclaimer: Do not actually rely on this app to differentiate poisonous mushrooms from edible ones!  The app provides a rough guess of the identity of a mushroom, not a definitive identification.

Under the hood, the app uses the Inception v3 model developed by Google, with the top layer of the model re-trained on a large collection of mushroom images. Many of the training images were taken from Wikimedia Commons, and others came from my personal photos that I’ve taken over the years.

The app can distinguish between about twelve varieties of mushrooms, most of which are native to North America and Europe. All of the trained varieties are common enough to be found easily in parks and forests, to maximize the app’s usefulness for the novice mushroom hunter.

When the app is launched, it automatically enables your phone’s camera, and starts attempting to recognize anything it sees in the image.  Therefore, all you need to do is aim the camera at a mushroom, and see what it says!

To maximize the accuracy of the mushroom recognition, try looking at the mushroom from the side, and bring the camera close enough for the mushroom to fill up most of the frame, like this:

I won’t make this app available on the Google Play Store for the time being, while I continue to refine the model, but if you’d like to check it out, you can build it from source code, or contact me for a pre-built APK that you can install on your device.

When considering today’s “VR” technology, the actual name “VR” is misleading: it’s not really “virtual reality.” A more accurate name for it would be “binocular display with motion tracking,” but that name is not nearly sexy enough to attract venture capital for your startup. I wanted to put all mentions of “VR” in this blog post in quotes, but that would be too on-the-nose even for me, so just imagine that the quotes are there.

I’ve played with many of the major VR headsets in an “enthusiast” capacity for a while now, and I’ve even developed a few applications for them. I really wanted to like VR. I tried really hard to suspend disbelief and make myself like it, but I just have to admit – I don’t see the appeal, and I don’t see the current generation of VR technology as anything more than a passing fad.

Coming soon to a landfill near you!

The only thing that the current VR experience delivers is novelty. It really is exciting to look into one of these headsets for the first time. However, the drop-off in novelty is very steep, on the order of minutes, not even hours.

There isn’t any one specific deal breaker for the current state of VR. It’s rather a combination of factors that, collectively, make it altogether unusable:

• It’s very low-resolution. In order for a VR experience to be “believable,” it needs to have a resolution of at least 4K per eye. Otherwise, you can literally see the pixels when you look at the image in the headset.
• It’s not nearly immersive enough. The field of view of the major VR headsets is about 100 degrees, which feels unnatural, and borders on claustrophobic. And the “depth” of the 3D content in the VR display can’t seem to match true natural proportions, either.
• It’s nausea-inducing. The sensors that track the 3D position of the headset need to be an order of magnitude more sensitive and responsive.
• The “headset” form factor is still too impractical to become mainstream. No matter how comfortable the headset becomes, if it still  needs to cover your eyes and wrap around your head, you won’t want to use it for very long.  Did you know that there’s a Netflix app for VR devices? If watching a two-hour movie while having  a big plastic appliance strapped to your face  is your idea of a good time, then I salute you, but I would still wager that you’re in the minority.

I don’t believe that VR technology can move forward by addressing any one of the above points. It would need to be a quantum leap of technological advancement.  And honestly, once the collective novelty of VR finally wears off, I’m not sure there will be enough interest among consumers  for VR companies to work towards this next leap any time soon, except perhaps  for very specific niche markets for which VR is better-suited.

I am, of course, looking forward to the final generation of VR, which will involve a Matrix-like interface that plugs directly into your brain stem. Until then, I’m afraid we can only look forward to landfills brimming with plastic contraptions thrown away shortly  after purchase.

I’ve just released a pretty significant update to DiskDigger for Windows, which introduces numerous improvements and features not only for casual home users, but also for professional investigators and forensics specialists. Here are the highlights from this update:

• • Now using a “Ribbon” interface, which contains navigation (Back / Next) buttons, configuration settings, and recovery options (see screenshot below).
  • Every section of DiskDigger’s workflow now has a “Help” button where you can find answers to common questions about the recovery process.
  • In “dig deeper” mode, you can now save and restore sessions (in the Advanced tab).
  • In both “deep” and “deeper” modes, you can now save a detailed report (in the Advanced tab) which is a log of all recoverable files found by DiskDigger, along with basic meta-information for each file.
  • Improved support for scanning disk images. In the Advanced tab when selecting a drive, click the “Scan disk image” button. For forensic-strength scanning of disk images, you can control the number of bytes per sector (all the way down to 1), for recovering files that may not be aligned to sector boundaries.
  • Added support for recovering raw images from Panasonic/Lumix cameras.
  • DiskDigger now requires .NET 4.0. Therefore, for running it on Windows XP or Windows Vista, you may need to install .NET 4.0 from Microsoft if you don’t have it installed on your system.

If you’ve accidentally deleted or lost your files, DiskDigger is always here for you!

One of the first apps I ever wrote for Android, and certainly the first app I published to the Google Play Store, was a simple unit converter app. (My god, that was nearly six years ago!) With over 150,000 loyal users, I’d say it’s been modestly successful, especially considering the hundreds of other similar utilities that exist on the Play Store.

Anyway, I thought it’s high time that this app receives some love, so I implemented a feature in the app that I’ve been wanting to make for quite a while: Widgets! You can now drop a widget right onto the home screen of your device, so that you can perform quick unit conversions on the home screen, without having to launch a separate app! You can also drop multiple instances of the widget, if you need more than one quick conversion. Here’s what it looks like:

The steps for putting a widget on your home screen varies for different Android devices, but generally it involves pressing-and-holding within an empty area of the home screen, and selecting from the “Widgets” menu. If you have the app installed, you should see a “Convert Units” widget that you can select and place on the home screen.

After placing the widget, you can configure which units it shows by pressing the “gear” icon on the left. You can then increment and decrement the value to convert by pressing the “+” and “-” buttons, or exchange the “to” and “from” units by pressing the widget itself.