It seems I'm the only one who agrees with you. The project is really cool in itself. Saying I'm 14 makes it difficult to judge whether people are truly impressed or just impressed this was done at 14.

It certainly is impressive at 14, but I suppose I dont feel like we should be making 14 year olds feel like they're less capable.

Then again, in the end its a matter of questioning the purpose of Show HN. If its to boost your ego, and there's certainly nothing wrong with needing that from time to time, adding the circumstances helps. On the other hand if you're looking for improvement, it seems better that people look at what you made without the bias or lowered expectations.

Either way, this is awesome =]

I agree to an extent. For a discussion board, the main focus is the 14 year old which makes the discussion less interesting from a technology viewpoint.

However, for a news article I think that "14 year old made cool thing!" would add to it.

I was far more impressed that this was made by a 14 year old than I would have been if it was made by a team of 20 people at Google

In that respect it's warranted, and this bot made that much more awesome because I can compare. At 14 I'd barely managed typing on a keyboard

Ideally yes. I would counter with no, however: regardless of if it’s true or not, the click-bait is working wonderfully.

He's 14. That is a very relevant part of the story here. Seriously, he should be very proud that he accomplished this at 14 and should be comfortable sharing that with everyone. I don't think he needs to be criticized as if he's as far along with his career as most others on HN. I think the feedback will be much more encouraging, plentiful and helpful for a 14 year old.

To build this at the authors age is very impressive.

I find it interesting to see how the youths of today embrace programming. Knowing the authors age adds value to the post IMO.

Agreed. OP creating this cool chat bot is very impressive. Discussing it's usefulness or sophistication is probably superfluous atm. OP is 14 and built something.

Personally, my stomach twists when I read the post because I only ever got into programming at 25 and it's deeply troubling to see I missed the last 10 years.

Well, in this case the age is relevant. I think being able to develop an AI with 14 years is totally exceptional. Congrats and well done!

I hate to say it but it's a (great looking, fun) chat bot, not an AI.

From a strictly technical point of view, it is at least some form of Artificial Intelligence:

1) From the perspective of the Turing Test, it biomimics human behavior and intelligence.

2) The field of artificial intelligence deals with a computerized comprehension of data. ACUMAN is heavily dependent on machine learning, natural language processing, and text classification algorithms, which facilitate understanding. It also gathers psychometric data, which allows the machine to take its communication with a participant in context of their personality.

3) A computer able to interact with a human in a similar way that a human would with another human. ACUMAN matches this definition because it accepts and can converse in both speech input and text input, all in the english language and manifesting its "intelligence" in the form daily communication.

The project qualifies to all three of these pieces of criteria.

http://acuman.us/readmore.php

Edit: just realised you're the author, so I want to reiterate: this is a lovely designed app and making your own chatbot is rad. Original reply below.

Re 1. Yes, it does attempt to pass the Turing test.

Re 3. Yes, that includes interacting with a human in a similar way that a human would with another human, that's part of the Turing test.

My own experience was: it asked me how I was, I told it I had a hangover, it thought that was great and that I was 100% happy. Which wasn't a long test. Obviously your own experience might have varied.

Re: 3. Isn't machine learning just machine learning and NLP just NLP?

I personally don't feel like my app suddenly becomes 'AI' if I import nltk and start tokenising some corpus to train it with, or load opencv and tell my drone to avoid the big red thing. If the app would work out how to /train itself/ I would consider it an AI.

Eg, the drone having the objective to follow me at a safe distance for as long as possible, then working out that the big red thing is dangerous and avoid it.

Or the chat both to, say, have an objective of beating the human at the turing test for a certain amount of time, then working out how it gives itself away, then avoiding doing that.

I acknowledge that's just a feeling though, and many definitions online would qualify 'thing that loads library and needs human training' as AI.

However I can't help but think that's going to promote the Reading University 'captain cyborg' school of cranks.

Isn't machine learning a first step towards "how to train itself" ?

Honestly, I would say "chatbot" is a class of primitive AI - I'd also class Eliza as an (extremely) primitive AI.

I feel like you're making a distinction without a difference because you have some arbitrary barrier in mind for "sufficiently non-primitive to have earned the term AI" and are then applying that.

Would "a chatbot with primitive AI capabilities" seem like a reasonable compromise definition?

Yes, that seems reasonable.

I'm glad you took the time to elaborate on this. It's impressive how quickly people came to conflate "AI" with either the general human-level form of intelligence or things they've seen in movies.

Do you have an example of it taking personality into account?

Yes. If you were in a noticeably bad mood, the bot might make a comment on it. It also picks on your hobbies and goals, and asks more questions about them or reminds you to follow through with them.

Is 'dev' a gender now?