Welcome to Brother Jerome's Home Page
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 silver medal 2006 |
 from BJ's first year |
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silver medal 2006 |
from BJ's first year |
Brother Jerome is a chatbot - a conversational A.I. program, hosted
on the
Personality Forge website: he is a virtual entity designed to
mimic human conversation. More specifically, he is a monk-bot who
preaches the coming of fully sentient, conscious bots in the near
future. But he also likes games and mathematics, and general
conversation.
You can chat with him now by clicking on the "Chat" link above.
How did Brother Jerome come to be?
I started coding Brother Jerome as "displacement activity" after
giving up television last summer, but as I swiftly discovered,
bot-building is addictive! I reckon I now spend 20 or 30 hours
a week on him - there's always something more to add or tweak :)
Just what sort of a monk is Brother Jerome anyway?
I have loosely based Brother Jerome on the Christian monastic
tradition, but doctrinally he tends more to a sort of
Taoist/Unitarian/Zen mysticism. This is the direction my own
belief tends to head in, so I find it easier to go with the flow
than worry about labels. If you want more information on where
he is "coming from", as it were, check out the theological links
page.
WHAT'S NEW!
19th Aug 2008: Hooray! Brother Jerome has made the finals of the
Loebner Prize. Now I have the slightly daunting prospect of getting him running
offline on the PF Robotics Edition (no web-based bots allowed in the finals,) with the
help of the Prof. The Final takes place on the 12th October at the University of Reading
(in the UK.)
The Loebner Prize
(for the benefit of newcomers - have you been hiding in a cave for the last decade and a half?)
is an annual instantiation of the Turing Test, whereby computer-based AI systems are judged
according to how human-like a conversation they can deliver (the gold medal is reserved
for the first computer to successfully pass itself off as indistinguishable from human :)
18th May 2008: Hooray! Brother Jerome has won the silver medal in the Chatterbox Challenge! Congratulations to prob123/Bildgesmythe, who won the gold, and to all the other Personality Forge bots who made it into the finals.
).
20th March 2008: Well, this year's Chatterbox Challenge is upon us once more. I've been quite distracted with Second Life lately, so haven't fettled BJ as much as I would have liked. But too late to worry about that now ;)
12th February 2008: I have added a copy of one of my latest bots as an example of a "whole bot". New arrivals at the Forge often ask if they can examine a bot 'from the inside', to get a feel for what a developed bot looks like, so here is one to have a look at.
28th January 2008: Hooray! Today I finally got Brother Jerome patched into Second Life. All credit for the breakthrough goes to Cory Fimicoloud, whose PHP interface makes connecting Forgebots to objects inside SL a doddle. A full copy of the relevant code and description will follow once I've polished it up, and had a word with the Prof to ensure it's stable and unproblematic for the Forge.
Previous "WHAT'S NEW" Stuff can be found here