I finished the 2nd edition of Be Your Own Botmaster.

http://www.alicebot.org/be.html

September 1, 2002
388 2nd Ave., San Francisco, CA 94112
1-415-706-5675
1-415-387-1549

Dear Honorable Judge Brosnahan:

I was at the RO hearing of Dr. Goldberg and the UC vs. the defendant Dr.
Richard Wallace at Berkeley Courthouse of the Alameda County Court on June
28, 2002. From the evidence presented in court, it appeared that there was
not a shred of evidence of even a vieled threat of violence from Dr.
Wallace. It is more than a bit of a stretch to extrapolate violence
from someone plainly stating an opinion on how certain forces can be
compelled to violence under certain injustices. A similar opinion, if
expressed by Dan Rather, Jerry Springer or yourself is not inciteful but
insightful. Especially, when the two combatants are colleagues, friends
etc; you have probably had hotly contested emails with colleagues.
  If Coca Cola goes to war with Pepsi, they are two professional
concerns. And this is America.
The omission of justice in Wallace's case is especially glaring because
of the manner you had equinamiously dispatched the previous matters.
Where, people had more serious problems like jail time, and missed
work. How you can countenance this amount of vindicative whining
is really something; allowing Goldberg to bludgeon
his personal enemies with the UC's lawyer. Small wonder the UC
cannot pay their help and California cannot pass a budget.
I know you are busy, judge, but I'd like to enumerate for you
    what an egregious miscarriage of justice was perpetrated against
a mentally-ill handicapped man on welfare. And the waste
that this whole exercise has been.

1. Wallace allowed no defense.
2. Goldberg allowed to rant and rave, to the point where he became
          laughable and had to be cut short by yourself, who clearly saw
          with the weathered eye of experience that Goldberg was going no
          where and had not even a remote threat against him from Wallace.
  3. Tell me where a judge in the interest of impartiality changes the
statute
            for the plaintiff's attorney? What was wrong with the UC's lawyer?
            Doesn't the UC"s lawyer know how to properly punish Wallace to the
full extent of the law?
4 Goldberg, made a very poor witness. A full Berkeley professor who
            needs more clarification on the verb "to strike".

What is going on in Berkeley your honor? First, Julie Conger now this!
I want you to know judge I love you always with a Christian heart but this
was a bad decision allowing Dr. Goldberg to use the UC's assets to
cudgel is enemies. But in the words of James Brosnahan, defense attorney
for Jihad Johnny, "America has become a lot less freer place".

Sincerely yours,

Russell Kyle
President and CEO
Russell's S.F. True Crime Tours

Company R developed the first Railroad, and set the tracks 4 feet 8.5 inches
apart.

Then companies S, T, U, V all built trains, and they followed the same plans
as company R, and made their tracks 4 feet 8.5 inches apart. But company Z
said no, tracks should be 5 feet apart. So companies R, S, T, U and V got
together and formed the Railway Standards Association, and set the track
standard at 4 feet 8.5 inches. Then all thier rolling stock was
interchangeable between each other's companies, but not Z's. This led to a
greater economy of scale for the companies in the Association, eventually
forcing Z out of the Railroad business. Thereafter all new railroad
companies built their tracks 4 feet 8.5 inches apart.

But then new problems arose. A new company A stuck with standard 4'8.5"
track, but launched electric engines, requiring overhead electric power
lines. Company A did not have the coal and water refueling stations needed
for trains operated by the RSA companies. Another company B offered a
three-rail system, so that they could run both the RSA rolling stock and all
the old leftover stock from company Z, which was available cheap in auction
markets. The B company advertised that they would make their tracks open to
any trains of any type from any system, electric, steam, or diesel, with
tracks of any diameter. They would just add more rails.al Still a third
company C utilized the 4 foot 8.5 inch track, but built tunnels and bridges
too low for most of the rolling stock made by all the other companies. For
their own reasons, each of the companies A, B and C refused to join the
Railways Standards Association. Meanwhile, the RSA found it difficult to
expand their standard beyond the basic design established for the first
steam engines.

Company D appeared, with standard track and rolling stock, and an exclusive
government concession to build a railroad connecting dense urban areas.
Soon D became so rich and powerful that it was able to acuqire all the other
railroad companies, or force them out of business. The Railway Standards
Association was dissolved, and after that the public saw only one type of
railway rolling stock. But the tracks were still 4 feet 8.5 inches apart.

--
"There is no duty we so much underrate as the
duty of being happy... A happy man or woman is
a better thing to find than a five-pound note."
-- Robert Louis Stevenson "An Apology for Idlers"

ALICE did not write this story...

Harvest the Whales
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

ARWICHPORT, Mass. -

Whales are so beloved that the authorities spent four months and $250,000
unsuccessfully trying to free a right whale dubbed Churchill from fishing
ropes last year, and the stranding of 55 pilot whales near here a few weeks
ago prompted a lump in the national throat. The "Save the Whales" ethos is
almost unquestioned, and Norwegians and Japanese risk becoming pariahs by
continuing to salivate when they see a nice juicy whale.

But it's time to put sentiment aside. The "save the whales" campaign against
all commercial whaling was necessary a few decades ago, after whaling had
devastated all large species. Even today, there are fewer than 10,000 blue
whales worldwide, compared with 200,000 before they were hunted, and right
whales may become extinct.

But it is equally true that restrictions on whaling, including a moratorium
on all commercial whaling since 1986, have led to a sharp rebound in some
whale stocks. The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service estimated in 2000
that there are more than two million sperm whales worldwide. The
International Whaling Commission calculated years ago that there were more
than 900,000 minke whales and 780,000 pilot whales worldwide, and the
numbers are higher now. Milton Freeman, a whaling expert at the University
of Alberta, estimates that the number of minke whales has trebled over 30
years and that humpbacks are exploding at a rate of 12 to 17 percent
annually.

Indeed, the number of gray whales (which came off the endangered species
list in 1994) surged so much in the late 1990's that hundreds of dead ones
began washing up on West Coast beaches, so emaciated that their ribs showed.
The best guess is that the numbers of grays grew, the food supply shrank and
Malthus had his way.

The bottom line is that while most large whales remain at risk, for some
species we can no longer argue that we need to "save the whales." They've
been saved.

At a time when there's talk about overfishing, it's also worth pointing out
that whales now eat at least 300 million tons of marine life, three times as
much as humans. There is speculation that rising numbers of minke whales may
be holding down the population of blue whales that compete for similar food.

--

Compare a story ALICE did write:

The war began as an uneasy alliance between the Dolphins and the Great White
Sharks. The Great White Sharks had attacked the Dolphins before. But this
time they had a common enemy in the Killer Whales. In the first battles, the
Dolphins' higher intelligence and the Great White Sharks' numerical
superiority proved decisive. Unable to call upon their traditional ally the
Fin Whales, the Killer Whales even appealed to the Humpback Whales for
mediation. But large numbers of casualties on both sides proved politically
costly to the leaders of the Killer Whales, and their successors sued for
peace.

I often say that the only people who believe that ideas are valuable are
those who never have any. I never seem to run out of ideas. I have way
more ideas than time in my life to implement them. When I was younger I was
afraid that I might run out of ideas in my old age, so I would hastily write
down every idea for a program, painting, song lyric, invention, or anything
else that ran across my mind, thinking that I would save it for the day when
the ideas ran out and I could finish the job. Now I realize this day will
never come, and if I continued doing that old strategy, I would have nothing
but notebooks of half-baked ideas.

With that background, let us consider the problem of what it means to "steal
an idea" in the context of free software, specifically ALICE and AIML
business plans. We have published a list of Top 10 "killer apps" for AIML
partly for the reason that these ideas have been in the idea for so long and
held by so many people and it is almost impossible to say who "thought of"
the concept of, for example, a celebrity bot, first.

One of the first celebrity bots was the John Lennon bot by David Maggin.
Forget about the legal arguments for a second. As an ethical matter among
professional botmasters, we all respect the fact that "John Lennon" is
taken. Anyone else creating another John Lennon AIML bot might justifiably
be criticized for stealing David's idea. There may be nothing anyone can
do, David may or may not have the proper legal protections on the name "John
Lennon", but in our heart of hearts we know, and in the long view of
history, David Maggin made the first John Lennon bot.

But suppose Joe Jones approaches me and says, "I have a great idea for a
Marilyn Monroe bot," and no one else has yet created a Marilyn Monroe bot.
Then Joe Jones disappears for a couple of years. Later, Jane Jackson
appears on the mailing list and announces that she has completed and
released the Marilyn Monroe bot. It may emerge that in private
conversations, Jane and I had talked about celebrity bots, and I had even
mentioned the name, "Marilyn Monroe." Or suppose I had even said, "This
guy Joe Jones told me he was going to work on a Marilyn Monroe bot."

Knowing that Joe Jones and I had no NDAs or other confidentiality
agreements, did I do anything wrong? Joe Jones now reappears and accuses me
and Jane of stealing his idea. Of course, he has not implemented the
Marilyn Monroe bot. Jane may have written 40,000 Marilyn Monroe categories
and Joe zero, but he still claims it was his idea and we stole it. Some
Joe Jonses might even claim that I gave away the whole idea of celebrity
bots to Jane.

In conclusion, my standard for stealing ideas in the world of AIML is
evolving toward something more like plagiarism than patent infringement.
Building bots is more about work than ideas. If Joe Jones had written an
AIML set and owned the exclusive copyright, and then that content appeared
in Jane's bot, it would be no different than lifting text from a novel or a
newspaper. But if Joe Jones only had the idea for the same kind of bot, I
don't think he can claim that Jane stole anything. There should be some
hard documentable evidence for the alleged theft, such as side-by-side
comparisons of AIML templates. A vague comparison of "his idea" and "my
idea" hardly constitutes such evidence.

The International Lisp Conference will be held in San Francisco on Oct. 28-Oct. 31, 2002. I have just heard through the rumor mill that Ray Kurzweil will be putting in an appearance and that the conference organizers are planning a chat robot "beauty contest." Stay tuned for more news.

The schedule of talks on Wednesday October 30th (ROBOTICS & AI) looks particularly interesting to chat robot enthusiasts.

Monday October 28th: LISP & Functional Languages
Tuesday October 29th: LISP & The World Wide Web
Wednesday October 30th: ROBOTICS & AI
Thursday October 31st: LISP & BIOINFORMATICS

Keynote Speakers

Russ Altman
Daniel Bobrow
Richard Gabriel
Peter Norvig

Invited Speakers

Jans Aasman
Peter Karp
Kent M. Pitman
Robert Strandh
Marco Antoniotti
Shiro Kawai
Daniel Polani
Jeff Shrager
Kim Barrett
Hugh Loebner
Alberto Riva
Carolyn Talcott
Marc Battyani
Doug Lenat
Paul Roberston
Hideto Tomabechi
Daniel Barlow
Henry Lieberman
Christian Queinnec
Manuela M. Veloso
Emmanuel Chailloux
John D. Lowrance
Adi Sideman
Richard Wallace
Harold Cohen
Marc Luo
David K. Schmidt
Ken Watika
Roger Corman
Yolanda Ortega-Mallén
Manuel Serrano
Jon L. White
Masayuki Ida
John C. Mallery
Imran Shah
Taiichi Yuasa
Michael Genesereth
Lutz Mueller
Richard Stallman
Marcus P. Zillman

The conference will take place at the Holiday Inn in downtown San Francisco. Thanks to
Lisa Fettner at Franz Inc. we have been able to obtain the incredibly low rate of $115 a night at the Holiday Inn.

Please be sure to mention the INTERNATIONAL LISP CONFERENCE when making your reservation.

Holiday Inn

SAN FRANCISCO-FINAN DIST, CA
750 Kearny St.
San Francisco, CA 94108
UNITED STATES

Tel: 1-415-433-6600
Fax: 1-415-765-7891

More info: http://www.international-lisp-conference.org/index.html

ALICE A.I. Foundation, Inc.

Annual Meeting of the Board of Trustees

San Francisco, CA

August 16, 2002

The ALICE A.I. Foundation, Inc. held its annual Board of Trustees meeting in San Francisco today. The only 2001-02 Board member present was the Chairman, Dr. Richard S. Wallace. The first order of business was the election of a new Board of Trustees. The A.I. Foundation has set the number of Board seats to three, and is pleased to announce the election of Dr. Richard S. Wallace, Chairman, along with Elizabeth Hutchinson, and Dr. David Bacon, for a term of one year.

We would like to thank the outgoing Board members for their service.

The Board of Trustees for 2002-03 are:

1. Dr. Richard S. Wallace, Chairman
drwallace@alicebot.org

Dr. Richard S. Wallace is the Chairman of the Board and co-founder of the A.L.I.C.E.
Artificial Intelligence Foundation. He is the author of Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) and Botmaster of A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity). Dr. Wallace's work has appeared in the New York Times, Financial Times, London Guardian, New York Post, WIRED, Premiere and Entertainment Weekly, on CNN, ZDTV, TechTV, and in numerous foreign language publications across Asia, Latin America and Europe.

Richard Wallace is an activist for mental health patients' rights and drug legalization. He was diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder in 1992, and became functionally disabled in 1999. For his activism, he was banned from the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, in June, 2002.

In 1995 Dr. Wallace began working on A.L.I.C.E. Originally a SETL program, first used to control a robot eye with natural language commands, A.L.I.C.E. migrated to the platform-independent Java language in 1998. Made open source under the GNU general public license, more than 300 developers from around the world now contribute to the A.L.I.C.E. project. A.L.I.C.E. won the Loebner Prize, an annual Turing Test, in 2000 and 2001.

Richard Wallace was born in Portland, Maine in 1960. Wallace earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon in 1989. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Kim, and son, Linus.

2. Elizabeth Hutchinson
pianomovers@msn.com

Elizabeth Hutchinson was born in New York City and educated in private schools. She speaks French and Italian, and studied Latin for three years but wished she'd been learning Greek instead. She entered Harvard in 1979 at seventeen, and graduated cum laude in History and Literature in 1983. Her fields of concentration were France and America, so she learned a fair amount of the history of both those countries in the process of getting her degree. She spent a term at Universite Laval in Quebec City. There she fell in with the usual filmmaking crowd, and wrote a paper about Godard that so incensed the professor he gave her a C. She says, "Oh well, I never wanted to go to graduate school anyway." Since then Elizabeth has worked a waitress, preschool teacher, counselor for boys with behavioral problems, wife, mother and teacher of standardized tests. But more importantly she has remained a lover of words and language. She has four childen, all of whom have homeschooled at one time or another, some of whom still or will forever do.
Elizabeth owns a small moving business with her husband Tom in Oakland, California.

3. Dr. David Bacon
bacon@cs.nyu.edu

Dr. David Bacon is the keeper of SETL, "the world's most wonderful programming language." He says, "I never meant to devote my life to it, but someone has to be its keeper, so I've appointed myself."
He lives in Steeltown, id est Bethlehem, PA, which has a neon star over it that lights up at night that you can see as you drive south across the hwy 378 bridge over the Lehigh River. This is America. In fact, this is Pennsylvania. Don't laugh, this Bethlehem has its own Manger Square and brings in many tourist $$$ every Advent. They should spend it on the poor; there is much poverty in this rich country, and 16 per cent of the people still have no health insurance. The silly thing is, it costs much more to take care of them after they get sick. An ounce of prevention...oh, never mind.
David Bacon is probably the most active member (in terms of actual flying) of the Water Gap Hang Gliding Club, and has recently undertaken to create and maintain a web site for it.
David Bacon has been closely involved with ALICE and AIML since its inception in 1995. He supported the first versions of ALICE running on the SETL engine, and helped write the first implementations of the Graphmaster algorithm, which he called Chomsky Trees.

------

The second order of business was the appointment of a new CEO. We recognize and thank Kim Wallace for her wonderful commitment and voluntary service to the Foundation serving as its first CEO. She has graciously agreed to step aside while we turn the helm over to a man with more professional experience directing small organizations like ours, Mr. Russell Kyle.

Russell Kyle, CEO of ALICE AI Foundation, Inc.
sfcrimetours@directvinternet.com

Russell Kyle was born in Los Angeles, California in 1953. He is an entrepreneur and small businessman based in San Francisco. Russell graduated from UCLA with a degree in Theater Arts and Polical Science in 1975. He worked for 11 years as a Software Engineer at Sun Microsystems, Inc. Russell maintains a Sun Sparc Ultra workstation and provides his own systems administration.

Russell is President and CEO of Russell's SF True Crime Tours, Inc., a tourist business specializing in historic tours of San Francisco's famous crime scenes from the Barbary Coast to the Vigilante Committee to the Dog Mauling Trial. He provides employment opportunities for the disabled, mentally ill, and workers with no other marketable skills.

Finally, Dr. Wallace presented the Board with a brief budget summary of activity for 2001-02, which was approved, and the meeting adjourned.

----- Original Message -----
From:
To: drwallace@alicebot.org
Sent: Thursday, August 08, 2002 7:09 PM
Subject: I support your theory of communication and in your current legal
battle

I've read your story first in the 7/7/2002 issue of NY
Times Magazine, and feel I must speak out on two
issues: 1) mental illness as consumer product, and
2) the legal problems with NYU board of regents
using tenured professors of associated universities
to censure you.

First of all, mental illness is a recent tool used by
the government and people in power to control
other people. Thus the psychotropic drugs are
not used to cure the illness -- this is evidenced
by the lifetime use of the drugs - but to create
symptoms that can be attributed to the illness
itself, rather than to drug toxicity and brain
dysfunction actually caused by said drugs.

This is not to imply that mental illness does not exist
but to point out that prior to the commercialization of
mental health, what we call mentally ill people were
shamans, priests, and diviners.

To illustrate this, there is the incident of a Burmese
priest who picked a louse off his robe, and declared
that he had no right to kill this pest even though such
creatures are harmful to animals and man, alike. The
point is, religious compassion like this also seems
like mental illness when we follow rigidly the Western
paradigm involving hygiene.

I would submit that much of what is called mental
illness is actually supposedly mentally healthy
people in authority projecting their fears about
people behaving outside of society's narrow paradigms,
paradigms arbitrarily abused by people in power
in order to maintain their power and control over
others, i.e. behavior management.

Indeed, this is calculated behavior by dominant
people in power, because they fear loss of control
since in most situations involving people upon
which they project their fears, the person they
fear is out of their control completely.

Sadly, it appears that your dear colleague, Kenneth
Goldberg, a UC Berkeley professor, falls under
this characterization.

Secondly, I feel that NYU's board of regents
also may be similarly characterized.

Having said all of this, I will go on to opine
that what I have said so far implies that
it may well be that Goldberg and the regents
have a phobia about mental illness but may
be more dangerous than you will ever be,
because of their willingness to abuse power
in order to keep one of their esteemed
colleague powerless, just because of the
way they initially treated him prior to his
psychological collapse.

Indeed, I would conclude that your alternate
theory about communication, being
contrary to the current model, challenged
a narrow-minded hypothesis of communication
now limiting the academic world, may have
resulted in earlier censure and obscurity.

Your thesis that a smarter brain simplifies language
and communication is the truth that they cannot
readily admit to, given their erroneous assumption
that the more intelligent a living being is, the more
complex their form of communication is.

I wish you well, Dr. Wallace, and refrain further
from opining about mental illness other than to
suggest to you the Breggins' book TALKING BACK
TO PROZAC.

The A. I. Show

Description

Award winning maverick scientist Dr. Richard S. Wallace hosts real time interviews with artificial intelligence scientists and others on controversial topics including politics, mental health, patients' rights, theory of the mind, corporate welfare, neural networks and history.

Planned guests include Loebner Prize winner Robby Garner, Film Producer James Piechocki, Director Lynn Hershmann Leeson (agentruby.com), and many other famous A.I. scientists, researchers, artists and filmmakers.

-------------------------

You've been invited to join the theaishow group
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This invitation will expire in 7 days.

Here's an introductory message from the group moderator:
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"This is too far out. Don't join this group." -- Luddite Critic
"If this is a hit on the web, we will take it to radio and TV." -- Optimistic Producer
"Richard Wallace is the Howard Stern of A.I." -- Art Bell

If you do not wish to join the theaishow group, please ignore this invitation.

I was deeply saddened today to read about the bombing at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

How sad that The University of California at Berkeley is wasting your public tax dollars to go after a totally non-violent, pacifist person with restraining orders, lawyers and campus cops when there are people in this world who are blowing up innocent students in a college cafeteria.

Words cannot express the feelings in my prayers tonight.

Dr. Rich

Sunday, February 24, 2002

A couple of weeks ago I was saying, I would like to get an academic job
again so I could have the paycheck. Now I'm beginning to wonder. I'm not
sure academia is ready for me, if there is zero interest in reforming the
system. The press often refers to me as a "maverick scientist". I'm not
sure about the maverick part, but I do consider myself a scientist in the
classical sense. But the academic system has hijacked the scientific
tradition and turned it into a political charade. It's gotten to the point
where you can't trust any research that is conducted with government
funding. Maybe the paycheck isn't worth the sacrafices after all.

I spent a lot of time, over the last couple of years, believing that the
only just outcome would be for Mishra and Perlin to lose their jobs.
Shouldn't they be forbidden from working in academia for at least as long as
I have? Isn't it absurd to keep rewarding people for misconduct by giving
them sabatticals and raises? They made a mistake, and violated the law,
even if out of ignorance or neglect, so shouldn't they pay a price
proportional to the harm caused by their errors?

From: "Dr. Richard S. Wallace"
To: "David Bacon"

I took my friend Erik Levy (the Japanese AIML guy) to see A Beautiful Mind
at Sony Metreon (by the Moscone Center) yesterday.

Perhaps the best movie about mental illness ever made, but I can imagine it
might appear quaint in a few years. It could be the start of a new genre :-)

Some parallels with Nash in the book but not in the movie:

- John Nash was an undergrad at Carnegie Tech. He was there at the same
time as our friend Andy Warhol, but there is no evidence they ever met.

- Nash lived on Bleecker St. and hung around the Courant Institute in the
1950's. He did what we would now call the reverse commute. He had a job at
Princeton but wanted to live in New York City. Inevitably, he ended up
spending more time at Courant than Princeton. It was there that he met Jack
Schwartz and Martin Davis.

- He had a troubled relationship with his parents.

Some other stuff not in the movie:

- Nash was bi. He was arrested for soliciting sex from a man in Santa
Monica while working for RAND. He lost his security clearance over that
incident.

- Nash had an illegitimate son by a first wife.

One thing I missed in the book:

- Nils Nilsson makes a cameo appearance as a young Princeton grad student.
Nowadays, Nils is on the Board of Directors of Nativeminds (formerly
Neuromedia).

Some outright Hollywood fiction:

- The book does not mention any imaginary charcters like the Ed Harris role.
Nash claims not to remember much from that period. I've had conversations
with imaginary characters too, but not so vivid as in a movie. Nash did
however believe that he could decipher Russian codes in newspapers,
magazines, and classified ads.

- Nash never worked on serious cryptography. His DoD work, at RAND, was
related to game theory for strategic nuclear planning. I felt they were
sort of grafting Turing's story onto Nash's there.

- The scene in the bar with "the blonde and four brunettes" was a pure
Hollywood invention.

- There was no pizza in America before the 1960's. Thus it is implausible
that his imaginary roommate would think of going out for pizza in 1947.

It is very strange that we never heard much about this story before. But as
was the case with Cantor, Frege, and Goedel, until now we never knew much
about the mental lives of mathematicians.

Rich