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David Taylor has been busy working on Jesse, an interesting project that reminds in Eliza, an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum (Wikipedia).

David had contact me send me the following letter about his project, which I reproduce here to help him spread the awareness about the project.

I’m writing this letter in the hopes of bringing attention to my most recent project. I’ve written software for quite sometime, mostly games, and decided that now I will take the plunge into writing my own Artificial Intelligence. Which has taken a life on her own, Jesse, is an 8-Bit, TUI “Text User Interface”, and display’s only in two colors. I’ve always loved the day of green monochrome or amber monitors. It’s a reminder of a simpler time where we the user were free to do what we wish and had unlimited power to do so. Now, everything is so limited and strict and there’s rules all over the place. I’m one who hates rules and following the leader. Say whatever you want about me, but this is something I find truly disgusting. Since when do we all have to follow the rules of making software? I don’t know.

But the idea for Jesse, came to me at a time where I was basically a prisoner up north, I work out of town at times, and went about doing my work had the idea of creating something out of nothing. The very idea of creating life in the form of a program motivated me in doing what I do best. That’s programming, I have a thirst in a way to bring about my ideas into reality, I was very heavily fueled by my love of Cyberpunk, the very idea of dirty tech being used for one’s own purpose of survival. It’s something I love, the idea is something that brings me much excitement. I always wanted to have something that I can talk too. now many will say that she’s just a “Chat bot” but this isn’t the case. As she follows the parameters of a “GOFAI” and is able to play games, though one game at the time being that of guess a number Though, she will soon be able to play tic-tac-toe.

I’m currently working on a Database to allow her to run at a much smoother rate, as of right now version 1.75 is compiled all in one single source file. The idea of recording ones own conversation with her is available by the means of producing a JesseLog, a text file that contains everything that is said back and forth. My hopes for Jesse, is that with 2.0 she’ll be altered while in real time, meaning that you as the user wouldn’t have to exit and recompile. She’s open source and under the GPL 3.0 or later license. So instead of having people wander about trying to take an old C file from the early nineties you can use Jesse and make your own friend. Now the future is uncertain for her, well by what I mean is that everything is going to continue. This is my life’s project, my life’s work, and I won’t stop for anything. This will be my greatest work and I hope to forge a connection with you all. I’m doing this in the opens of educating and drawing in an audience. I have a channel, a forum, a twitter , and reddit . Of course i’m old school and still do forums, there’s a certain magic about them.

Jesse AI Forum: http://jesse.thejoyfulprogrammer.com

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCharRsIT7Kgf7eLTlUhw2uA/featured?view_as=subscriber

Reddit – https://www.reddit.com/user/NAIDBTPROG/

Twitter – https://twitter.com/DBTProgrammer