About
This is the web site of Avatar Phi Rho, the digital alter-ego of Philip Rhoades. The various projects that Phi Rho is or will be involved in are discussed here. the big chunks of stuff are in the accordion and the smaller announcement / quick stuff is in the blog posts below that.
In the accordion below click on a heading or subheading to expand or collapse a section.
Last updated: 2020-07-30
I had always been interested in Radical Life Extension and Hibernation or some sort of Suspended Animation are staples of Science Fiction. I became actively involved in the Cryonics Association of Australia in the late '90s and set up the Neural Archives Foundation in 2008. However, with the increasing number projects I was building, I found I needed help with all the extra work these projects were creating - the thought occurred to me that some sort of electronic helper would be a good thing . .
I started actively looking at modifying and existing chatbot for my own purposes in early 2014 and, delays being what they are with life, had something working a couple of years later.
Chatbots using text input and output had evolved significantly since the Eliza - an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966[1] at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between humans and machines, Eliza simulated conversation by using a 'pattern matching' and substitution methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the program, but had no built in framework for contextualizing events.
However, in the end, Phi Rho was just another chatbot and though he was interesting and funny, he still wasn't what I actually needed and the world was moving on to voicebots instead of text-based chatbots . . so v1 has been retired - but if anyone would like to chat to him, let me know and I will supply the URL. Also, if anyone has Java skills and would like to hack around on the code - also let me know.
