Here to explain my large gap in posting and to update everyone on my works in artificial intelligence, this post arrives with a write up about my personal performance in the 2011 Chatterbox Challenge, a competition to measure the relative “strength” of individual natural language programs, a summary of how my program worked and my general strategy, as well as another brief synopsis on where I want to go next.

In a previous post, I mentioned that it might be worthwhile to create a computer program capable of making syllogistic inferences — that is understanding new information from inputted information via syllogistic logic. Such programs already exist, but I would like to use my amateur skills to add something. Wikipedia does have an article on syllogisms, but it is not easy to follow and some of the syllogisms listed seem not to make sense. Thus, to aid my own understanding and add yet another esoteric essay, I would like to completely categorize all possible syllogisms, so that I would have a benchmark for a program.

After the victory of IBM’s Watson in Jeopardy!, it seems like machine intelligence could be in for a new awakening. However, there are much more challenging tasks to be solved than responding to Jeopardy questions — we need a machine that can respond to *any* question. Skynet aside, why is no one building such a device? And more importantly, how could we? Where would we start?

I have found a need for a script that will take a number written as a word (sixteen) and turn it into the actual number in normal form (16). However, it is difficult to do so efficiently and for very complicated numbers, like “seven hundred five million sixty six thousand and six”. How do you get the algorithm to return 705066006? With no answers available on the internet, I put my personal PHP skills to work.

I’ve been to the wonderful resource that is Wikipedia a lot, and I’ve always particularly enjoyed pressing the random article button. However, I’ve always been a little annoyed when I keep arriving at three sentence paragraph “stubs” (what Wikipedia calls articles that need great improvement), which unfortunately make up the majority of Wikipedia. So I decided to make a program that instead of selecting any article, only generates random featured articles, which are supposed to be the best of Wikipedia.

This blog entry is technical, and intended for people who own websites that use PHP. Today we look how to make the sweetest 404 page ever, one that allows you to help your users figure out what went wrong rather than just give them a bland page. Check it out!