>From the rewrite-in-progress of the User Manual -- 1.2 History of MindForth
In the beginning was Mind.REXX on the Commodore Amiga, which the author Mentifex began coding in July of 1993, and publicizing in the Usenet comp.lang.rexx newsgroup. The late Pushpinder Singh of MIT sent e-mail expressing his amazement that anyone would try to do AI in REXX. Mentifex mailed back the entire Mind.REXX source code. Another fellow, an IBM mainframe programmer, tried to port the Amiga Rexxmind to run on his IBM mainframe -- which would have been a Kitty-Hawk-to-Concorde leap -- but the REXX AI code was not fit for IBM consumption. When Mind.REXX thought its first thought in late 1994, Mentifex posted news of the event in Usenet newsgroups for many of the most significant programming languages. Only the Forth community took up the AI challenge and expressed any interest in translating the AI program. A maker of Forth chips gave advice and counsel, and a maker of robots requested a copy of Mind.REXX for porting into the Forth in which he programmed his robots. Sorely disappointed at not having established a colony of AI Minds on IBM mainframes, Mentifex resolved to learn Forth on his own and assist in the porting of Mind.REXX into Mind.Forth for use in amateur robotics. Mentifex bought a copy of Starting Forth at a used book store and recorded his pilgrim's progress in the first volume of the Mind.Forth Programming Journal (MFPJ). The amateur robot-maker, a professional engineer, flew to Seattle on business with Boeing and visited Mentifex in his Vaierre apartment with a lesson on Forth coding. Another engineer, formerly with IBM and a REXX expert who had helped Mentifex in the coding of Mind.REXX AI, flew to the Bay area for a REXX conference at S.L.A.C. and was treated to dinner by the maker of Forth chips. Unfortunately, Mentifex did not try hard enough to learn Forth and the Forthmind project languished in 1996 and 1997 -- while Netizens were attacking Mentifex for daring to claim that he had developed a theory of mind for AI. It gradually dawned on Mentifex that in every Usenet newsgroup related to AI or robotics, there was always one fellow who considered himself the ultimate authority on the subject matter of the newsfroup, and woe unto anyone, especially an independent scholar like Mentifex, who dared to make an extraordinary scientific claim (ESC) on so grave a matter as announcing actual progress in AI. When the alpha male of comp.robotics.misc (a really cool guy, by the way) bracchiated over to Mentifex in the group in 1997 and launched an unseemingly vicious ad hominem attack, Mentifex knew not how to defend himself and was overcome with feelings of immense gratitude when the foxie Forth chip maker smote the troublemaker a mighty blow in defense of Mentifex. Forthwith Mentifex took up Forth again and devoted the entire year of 1998 to porting Mind.REXX into the native language of telescopes and robots -- Forth. In Mind.REXX, Mentifex had gone overboard in creating variables for even the slightest chance that they might turn out to be useful. Nobody had ever written a True AI before, it was all uncharted territory, and it seemed better to err on the side of too many variables rather than too few. In Forth, however, variables are anathema. Forthers prefer to put a value on the "stack" instead of in a variable. Mentifex never became a genuine, maniacally obsessive Forth programmer, but chose to program his AI in Forth code that looked enough like other languages to be easy to understand and to be easy to port from Forth. While Mentifex moved his AI coding efforts from MVP-Forth on the Amiga to F-PC on IBM clones and finally to Win32Forth, he also in 2001 (a space odyssey) suddenly ported MindForth into JavaScript so that users could just click on a link and have the Tutorial AI Mind flit across the 'Net and and take up albeit brief residence on their MSIE computer. While Push Singh was simply amazed at doing AI in REXX, many Netizens openly laughed and sneered at the idea of coding an AI Mind in JavaScript, which was not by any means a traditional AI language. Mentifex, however, suspected that his Mind.html in JavaScript was slowly building the largest installed user base of any AI program in the world, because it was so easy to save-to-disk the Mind.html code and because Site Meter logs reported the spread of the AI. Mentifex fell into the practice of switching back and forth between coding AI in JavaScript for a while and then in Forth. In March of 2005 Mentifex began coding powerful diagnostic routines into MindForth. He began to find and eliminate bugs that he could not deal with earlier because he had not even suspected their existence. Meanwhile, Mr. Frank J. Russo began to code what became http://AIMind-i.com -- a version of the Forthmind with its own site on the Web and with special abilities far beyond those of Mind.Forth, such as the ability to send and receive e-mail, and the ability to surf the Web. On 7 June 2006, Mentifex was "tweaking some parameters" and made a breakthrough in his quest for the "slosh-over effect" -- where activity on subject-concepts combines with activity on a verb to "slosh over" onto the selection of a correct object to go with noun and verb. It took another year and a half of programming to achieve the True AI of 22 January 2008 as described in this Manual. ATM -- http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/mind4th.html http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/m4thuser.html ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=93208591-d770cb
