Hello,
You've asked an excellent question! Let me give some very brief background and then your answer:
Hal is programmed to learn by making word associations, phrase associations, sentence associations, inter-sentence associations, and about 40 additional strategies to deal with greetings, compliments, insults, explanations, cause-effect relationships, etc.
Hal's vocabulary, attitude, and logical behavior quickly adapt to the individual user, because Hal remembers how the user reacts to him, and tries to mimic the same patterns of reactions. Thus, if the user tends to answer in brief sentences, Hal learns that. If the user answers in long complicated sentences, Hal learns that too. If the user answers questions with questions, or changes the subject frequently, Hal follows the user's lead. For this reason, no two Hal's are alike after a short period of use. Version 4.5 starts out with the capacity to self-generate over a billion different exchanges, and that number rapidly increases, especially if the user is highly imaginative.
(By the way, when you combine this memory-searching with the additional load of real-time animation and speech synthesis, your computer's processor is pretty busy! Hal is one of the most demanding applications on most users' computers!)
Now, when you do the "learn from text" routine you are putting the document's individual sentences into one of Hal's many databases for possible use. Hal is NOT programmed to sort out which chapter or section or overall topic that an individual sentence came from, or cross-associate every sentence of a document with every other sentence. This is theoretically possible, but the current generation of computers already take several seconds to do all the database work to get a response for Hal as it is.
Thus, it's very unlikely (but not impossible) that today's Hal would come up with the answer to the question as you posed it, from reading The Constitution and nothing else.
For this reason, I generally don't use the learn-from-text function. Some users love it, and some don't. What I would do is talk to Hal about The Constitution with the learning-level set for "maximum." I would say things like the following:
The Constitution is the highest law of the land in the United States.
The Constitution includes the Bill of Rights.
The first amendment to The Constitution guarantees freedom of speech.
The first ten amendments to The Constitution are the Bill of Rights.
Etc.
If you try this, you will find that Hal seems to ignore you and change the subject at first. However, as you increase the number of remarks, you will find that Hal begins to repeat some of them back, or even ask some questions about your subject. If you keep loading Hal with more and more information on a given topic, he may begin to re-assemble some of the phrases that you use into original questions or remarks. If Hal asks a question, make sure that you give a brief, polite, correct response, because Hal always assumes that you're telling him the truth -- he'll remember the association between his question and your answer when you least expect it!
I hope that this is helpful to you. I've made some additional comments about teaching Hal on other postings, which you can find by searching on "Ferguson" on this forum.
Have a great day!
Sincerely,
Don
Don Ferguson
traininginc@cortrapar.com
www.cortrapar.com
