FreeHAL was a

volunteer computing Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which people donate their computers' unused resources to a research-oriented project, and sometimes in exchange for credit points. The fundamental idea behind it is that a modern desktop co ...

project to build a self-learning

chatbot A chatbot or chatterbot is a Software agent, software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or Speech synthesis, text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. Designed to convincingly si ...

. This project is no longer active. Originally, the program was called ''JEliza'' referring to the chatbot

ELIZA ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between humans and machines, E ...

Joseph Weizenbaum Joseph Weizenbaum (8 January 1923 – 5 March 2008) was a German American computer scientist and a professor at MIT. The Weizenbaum Award is named after him. He is considered one of the fathers of modern artificial intelligence. Life and caree ...

. The ''J'' stood for

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

because JEliza has first been programmed in Java. In May 2008, the program has been renamed to ''FreeHAL'' because the programming language has changed. The name is related to the computer in the film '' 2001: A Space Odyssey''. FreeHAL uses a

semantic network A semantic network, or frame network is a knowledge base that represents semantic relations between concepts in a network. This is often used as a form of knowledge representation. It is a directed or undirected graph consisting of vertices, ...

and technologies like

pattern recognition Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. It has applications in statistical data analysis, signal processing, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression, computer graphi ...

stemming In linguistic morphology and information retrieval, stemming is the process of reducing inflected (or sometimes derived) words to their word stem, base or root form—generally a written word form. The stem need not be identical to the morpholog ...

, part of speech databases and

Hidden Markov Model A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a statistical Markov model in which the system being modeled is assumed to be a Markov process — call it X — with unobservable ("''hidden''") states. As part of the definition, HMM requires that there be an ob ...

s in order to imitate a human behaviour. FreeHAL learns autonomously. While communicating by keyboard, the program extends its database. Currently, English and German are supported. By using the

BOINC The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC, pronounced – rhymes with "oink") is an open-source middleware system for volunteer computing (a type of distributed computing). Developed originally to support SETI@home, it beca ...

platform, new semantic networks for the program are built. FreeHAL@home appears to have terminated operations.

Awards

In 2008, the program won the first prize in the category "Most Popular" at the Chatterbox Challenge, a yearly competition between different similar chatbots.

Publications

There was an article about FreeHAL in the ''

Linux Magazine ''Linux Magazine'' is an international magazine for Linux software enthusiasts and professionals. It is published by the former Linux New Media division of the German media company Medialinx AG. The magazine was first published in German in 199 ...

'', Issue 97 from December 2008. In the German magazine ''com!'', the program was on the CD/DVD and in the list of the Top-10-Open-Source programs of the month.

References

External links

Website archive

Linux-Magazine Issue 97, p. 94f
* com! Magazine, Issue

an

Science in society Free science software Volunteer computing projects Free simulation software History of artificial intelligence Chatbots Software using the GPL license Free artificial intelligence applications {{compu-network-stub