

Couple.me Releases Alice – An Artificial Intelligence - kg4lod
http://blog.couple.me/2014/03/31/couple-releases-alicealex-ai-artificial-intelligence-couple/

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euank
On the [https://couple.me/alice](https://couple.me/alice) page, to make text
appear a little at a time they setup a long series of timeouts set to trigger
at different times (as you can see here:
[https://couple.me/javascripts/alice.js](https://couple.me/javascripts/alice.js)).
They are not dependent on each other.

This leads to unusual behavior if you do something as simple as tab away while
one of them is playing for about 10 seconds. On both Chrome and Firefox, that
will result in, when you tab back, complete gibberish as multiple timeouts
that triggered while you were away both begin "typing" their text. I think the
correct solution here is to have all callbacks drawing text depend on the
previous one completing (since there's no overlaps, this should work well
enough).

That entire sequence also felt very trite to me, but I can see how it could be
appealing.

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TaylorAlexander
I opened it on mobile and it was all extremely laggy and out of sync. It makes
me wonder how good their AI would be if web pages are this much trouble.

Snark aside though, I do hope this is not an april fools joke, and that it's a
real attempt at AI. I know it would really just be a complex traditional
program, but I'm still curious what a modern try at AI would look like. I know
it's coming back into development as of late, and I do very much look forward
to the development of real AI.

If anyone wants to comment to inform me that real AI will never happen, I
assure you I am already aware of that view. I see no basis for the argument
that human intelligence is somehow special in this world. For medical science
alone we will never stop researching the human mind, and I hope soon we find a
way to recreate intelligence in software. It would be a level of intelligence
above ours, I would think.

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Oculus
I agree with carlosdp, this is most likely April fools.

Side Note: Happy to see a Waterloo startup up on front page!

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carlosdp
April fools I assume =P

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sal19
Not real, confirmed: [http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-
april-fo...](http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-april-fools-
day-tech-20140331,0,47108.story#axzz2xfI8hv3Q)

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wingerlang
> Love, jealousy, and affection are all emotions that Alice feels. Your
> responses to her affect her mood, and she will react as a real person would.

> and she will react as a real person would.

I have my doubts.

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neilk
Given what Couple.me does, I expect the AI will just be other users of the
appropriate orientation. Maybe slightly more poignant than the average April
fool's joke.

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Spongeroberto
First thought of April fools. Now I think this might actually be useful as a
data mining application.

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dsugarman
her

