The Arthur T. Murray/Mentifex FAQ


1. What was the Mentifex AI project?

Mentifex AI was the Lebenswerk of an independent scholar
in artificial intelligence (AI) who first worked out a theory of mind
for AI and then programmed a simple AI Mind in Forth and a tutorial
AI Mind in JavaScript to demonstrate implementation of the theory.


1.1 Were there any positive reactions to the Mentifex AI initiatives?

The intellectual elite responded favorably to Mentifex AI,
while lesser lights (see below) vituperated ad hominem against Mentifex
without bothering to understand and critique the Mentifex ideas.

Dr. Benjamin Goertzel, arguably the Albert Einstein of artificial intelligence, wrote --
about the serious thinking on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by Mentifex -- that
the ideas themselves are significantly better than most of what passes for cognitive science and AI.


1.2 What sort of negative reactions impeded the progress of Mentifex AI?

Typical Mentifex-bashing occurred in such venues as Amazon reviews of AI4U.


2. Who was Arthur T. Murray?

Arthur T. Murray (ATM) was the independent AI scholar,
who from early boyhood followed multiple interests in
electronics, linguistics, chess, religion, magic,
science fiction and so forth into a culminating life-long
quest for the devising of a thinking computer
created in the image and likeness of Homo sapiens.


2.1 What was the education of Mentifex?

Starting with kindergarten just outside the
Mount Rainier Ordnance Depot near Fort Lewis WA USA,
ATM/Mentifex attended Army brat schools until age nine
and ordinary schools such as Blanchet High School
in Seattle WA USA. His undergraduate years were
at the University of Washington and he attended
graduate school at the Berkeley campus of the
University of California. Mentifex graduated
from a course in the electronics of nuclear weapons
taught by the Nuclear Training Directorate at
Sandia Base in Albuquerque NM USA. Mentifex and his
favorite German poet, Heinrich Heine, both attended the
Georgia-Augusta Universität in Göttingen, Germany.


2.2 What were the AI credentials of Mentifex?

You who read this FAQ probably have much better AI credentials
than ATM/Mentifex ever did. As an eight-year-old,
left-handed boy of the jungle in the Panama Canal Zone,
ATM followed a fascination with electricity into years
of building ever more complex hardware experiments,
ranging from radio receivers and a transmitter up through
switching circuitry and artificial life, until the
Grand Challenge beckoned ineluctably to Mentifex --
thou shalt build an artificial [Mind].

Since the AI imperative was already set in ATM's mind
by the age of twelve, Mentifex tailored his education
in furtherance of acquiring the skills necessary for
a lifelong AI project. He became fluent in German,
Russian, Latin and Greek, with a smattering of
French, Spanish and Japanese. By reading the ancient
philosophers in the original Greek and Latin, Mentifex
acquired a root understanding of the vocabulary of
science, and two weird, Gonzo science skills -- the
ability to read Esperanto without studying Esperanto,
and the ability to think and dream in ancient Latin.


3. Why did ATM succeed at AI where others failed?

Mentifex succeeded admirably in AI after first failing miserably
with buggy code that did not work and that slowed computers down
to a standstill. Success loomed in 2005 when Mentifex began to
install diagnostic routines into Mind.Forth and began to
flush out and eliminate profoundly hidden bugs and
glitches, until in January of 2008 the AI Forthmind
"ran out of bugs" and began to demonstrate true AI thinking.
Then Mentifex began to upgrade the JavaScript AI Mind
to the Mind.Forth level of AI functionality.


4. What was the Singularity Timeline pursuant to Mentifex AI?


5. Why was the Mentifex AI Mind written in Forth?

Although ATM/Mentifex initially coded an AI Mind in REXX on
the Commodore Amiga 1000 computer, [Mind.REXX] in 1994 attracted
the attention of Forth programmers who were interested in
porting the AI to Forth for installation in robots.
Mentifex decided to learn Forth in order to assist in the port.
As the community of active Forth programmers dwindled over time,
fewer and fewer people could appreciate Mind.Forth in Win32Forth,
but meanwhile a JavaScript version for MSIE came into being.


6. Why was there a JavaScript tutorial version of MindForth?

In the year 2000, Mentifex watched with astonishment as another
programmer converted some HTML trickery of Mentifex into
an equivalent but flashier JavaScript program. Thus Mentifex
was inspired to translate Mind.Forth into JavaScript so that
users would not have to download Forth and load the AI Mind
into Forth, but could simply click (go ahead, try it :-) on
the [Mind.html] link and see the artificial mind flit across
the Web into the host habitat of the user's personal computer.

People sneered at using JavaScript for AI, but gradually
the JSAI acquired arguably the world's largest installed
user base of any True AI program, as Netizens not only
clicked on the Mind program to run it, but also made
local copies of the AI that was already on their screen.

Mentifex released the JavaScript Mind User Manual (JMUM)
as a mutatis mutandis clone of the Mind.Forth User Manual (MFUM).


7. Why did Mentifex take so many AI shortcuts to achieve True AI?

If Mentifex did not take the shortcuts, there would have been no True AI.
It was necessary to get a working AI Mind up and running as
proof-of-concept software to prove the validity of the AI theory.
Each AI shortcut was simply a way to show mental functioning in
software without going the long way around via evolution or
genetic algorithms. Top-down AI design, as opposed to bottom-up
design, sometimes required showing the barest and simplest phenomenon
of each desired goal in the ambitious rush to creating True AI.
Once True AI gains a toehold in the noosphere and the blogosphere,
there is plenty of evo-time for backtracking and doing AI evolution.


7.1 What were the AI shortcuts taken by Mentifex?

7.2 What public archives mention the AI shortcuts taken by Mentifex?

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.forth/msg/9ff435bd49233604
was a Usenet post by Mentifex on Thursday 5 August 2004 with the first
publication of the list of AI shortcuts.

http://www.mail-archive.com/agi@v2.listbox.com/msg01938.html
was a post by Mentifex on Sunday 22 August 2004 describing AI
shortcuts for the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) mailing list.


8. What other AI projects were spawned by the Mind of Mentifex?

The AI Mind of Mr. Frank J. Russo at http://AIMind-i.com
was the main offshoot in AI evolution from the original AI Forthmind.
Earlier attempts at emulating the Mentifex AI Mind were just as
unsuccessful as the bug-ridden Mentifex software, but future
emulations should achieve the Mentifex level of success and beyond.


9. What was the AI4U textbook of artificial intelligence?

In 2002, after the creation of several AI mind-modules beyond the
requirements of the simplest demonstration of thinking, Mentifex
decided to use print-on-demand (POD) publishing through
iUniverse.com to author a textbook of artificial intelligence.
The documentation webpages of the thirty-four mind-modules
of Mentifex AI were turned into the thirty-four chapters of AI4U.
Although the publisher wanted a fee paid for the inclusion
of graphics, ATM/Mentifex avoided that expense by using
an ASCII [mind-diagram] as a graphic illustration at the
start of each chapter.

After the book came out in November of 2002, Mentifex mailed out
several review copies and secured a free review from Book News[?]
of Portland OR USA. In 2005, viciously negative reviews appeared
on Amazon and were ignored by Mentifex, but a scholarly review
by Prof. Robert W. Jones on 30 November 2006 was answered by
Mentifex with a [review of the review].

In August of 2007 Mentifex began to integrate the
mind-module webpages with links into AI background
articles on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
When a question was raised on aima-talk about
a third edition of the mainstream AIMA textbook,
aima-talk message #789 gave a link to the
Textbook Revolution website. Mentifex immediately
proposed the offering of a Wikipedia-based
free AI textbook consisting of the basic AI4U
material, plus updated chapter webpages,
plus links from each chapter webpage
into Wikipedia as a source of AI background information.
Thus a dynamically mutating, multi-author AI textbook
was born of the original AI4U textbook, because
the mind-module webpages were subject to revision
by updating over time, and thousands of Wikipedia
contributors were constantly augmenting the
AI background articles. Traditional AI textbooks
were now obsolete and not worth the outrageous
prices being charged for them, because the slow
process of issuing new editions could not keep
up with the rapid accretion of AI-related material
onto the Wikipedia encyclopedia.


10. What is the state of the art of Mentifex AI?

The AI genie can no longer be put back into the AI bottle.
The memes of Mentifex are out there, infecting intelligent
human minds with the know-how to build non-human intelligence.
The primitive AI Mind software shows the Main Core of
top-down mind-design.


11. What may we expect from Mentifex AI in the future?

More of the same -- upgrading of the AI Mind software, user manuals
and documentation webpages. In 2008, ATM/Mentifex was working to
engender parallel distibutive processing of the Mentifex AI initiatives.
The AI work was being documented and archived for passing the torch
to new generations of AI enthusiasts who might carry the flame of
True AI onwards to the Technological Singularity.


12. Who wants to be the next Mentifex?


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