FreeHAL - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Name

First, the program was called JEliza referring to the chatbot ELIZA

ELIZA

ELIZA is a computer program and an early example of primitive natural language processing. ELIZA operated by processing users' responses to scripts, the most famous of which was DOCTOR, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist. Using almost no information about human thought or emotion, DOCTOR...

by Joseph Weizenbaum

Joseph Weizenbaum

Joseph Weizenbaum was a German-American author and professor emeritus of computer science at MIT.-Life and career:...

.
The J stood for Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

because JEliza has first been programmed in Java. In May 2008, the program has been renamed to FreeHAL because the programming language has changed. Since that time the name is related to the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, partially inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel...

Functionality

FreeHAL uses a semantic network

Semantic network

A semantic network is a network which represents semantic relations among concepts. This is often used as a form of knowledge representation. It is a directed or undirected graph consisting of vertices, which represent concepts, and edges.- History :...

and technologies like pattern recognition

Pattern recognition

In machine learning, pattern recognition is the assignment of some sort of output value to a given input value , according to some specific algorithm. An example of pattern recognition is classification, which attempts to assign each input value to one of a given set of classes...

, stemming

Stemming

In linguistic morphology and information retrieval, stemming is the process for reducing inflected words to their stem, base or root form—generally a written word form. The stem need not be identical to the morphological root of the word; it is usually sufficient that related words map to the same...

, part of speech databases and Hidden Markov Model

Hidden Markov model

A hidden Markov model is a statistical Markov model in which the system being modeled is assumed to be a Markov process with unobserved states. An HMM can be considered as the simplest dynamic Bayesian network. The mathematics behind the HMM was developed by L. E...

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.

FreeHAL@home

By using the BOINC infrastructure new semantic networks for the program are built.

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.

Please, join FreeHAL@home by downloading BOINC, a screensaver that borrows CPU time to a science project you choose.

Publications

There was an article about FreeHAL in the Linux Magazine
Linux Magazine
Linux Magazine is a European professional journal. It addresses itself to readers who work professionally with operating systems based around the Linux kernel. Linux Magazine is published by Linux New Media AG and was born after the great success of Linux-Magazin...

, 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.

Sources

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.