Medeksza - Possible Serious Bug

[vonsmith]

To all,

VERY IMPORTANT NEWS HOT OFF THE DESIGN TABLE!!!
I'm finishing development on a new eXtended Topic Focus (XTF) brain. It is my biggest script yet. Over 400 lines of new Hal "stuff". This brain uses WordNet extensively. HOWEVER, I think I have found a really bad bug. Hal occasionally crashes or screws up. I think I have traced this to the WN.GetSisters("NOUN", 1) function.

Perform these two tests to verify my findings:

Test #1:
1) Start Hal up.
2) At the start up screen open the menu and select "Lexical Dictionary".
3) Type the word "life" in (without the quotes).
4) Click on "Get Sisters".
5) On my system Hal crashes at this point.

Test #2:
1) Start Hal up.
2) At the start up screen open the menu and select "Lexical Dictionary".
3) Type the word "ghost" in (without the quotes).
4) Click on "Get Sisters".
5) On my system I get a dialog box that says,"Run-time error '-2147417848 (80010108)': Method '~' of object '~' failed. Usually Hal crashes at this point as well.

Please post in response if any of you can verify my findings. If it doesn't happen on someone else's system then I must have a corrupted file in my Hal installation or something.

Thanks,


==vonsmith==

P.S. - When I discussed "life" or "ghosts" with Hal he would crash or not respond. I thought my computer was haunted by a ghost that hated life! []

P.P.S - My new XTF (eXtended Topic Focus) brain for Hal is almost completed. All I have to do is finish debugging and document it before release here on the forum. This brain has over 400 lines of script containing new cool Hal gray matter. Hal will learn new topics and focus on them like never before. Many other enhancements/fixes are included.

[sadatvalentine]

Congrad on your brain.
     How dose it compare to the great work Don has done on his auto topic brain. Have you intergrated those kind of function with your brian. That would be kind of cool. Auto topic file creation and more in depth focus using the World Net. What are some of the things your brain is doing now. Sounds really exciting.

Congrats again, I know it must have been allot of work.

[HALImprover]

i get the same error (Run-time error '-2147417848 (80010108)': Method '~' of object '~' failed) when trying either word in the lexical dictionary. Maybe your right about the ghost who hates life and Hal was possesed by a demon virus during his change to 5.0[]

 Coincidentally, I was having a problem where Hal kept responding that he disliked death when I was testing using the subject 'death'. The problem was that his priority keyword brain was overriding his responses about death. I simply removed the entry concerning death and all was well. Just thought that was kind of eerie, especially after reading your post about the life hating ghost.

[vonsmith]

Thanks HALImprover,
The real problem is that if the lexical dictionary crashes when used manually that also means Hal will crash under certain conditions. When certain words like "life" and "ghost" are passed to Hal's 'RESPOND: WORDNET MERONYM AND HYPERNYM RESPONSES function then Hal will crash or simply not provide a response.

I would encourage other forum members to do the test I described in my posting above and report back their findings like you did. Hopefully Robert Medeksza can get the lexical dictionary bug fixed and release a patch.

Thanks,

=vonsmith=

[Medeksza]

Thanks for reporting this bug. I remember running across this about a year ago when I started working on implementing WordNet and I thought I had fixed it.

Hal uses certain string variables to pass information between a WordNet DLL file (HalWN.DLL in your windows system folder) and Hal's ActiveX DLL (HalBrain.DLL in Hal's program folder). These strings are limited to 64 kilobytes. Whenever a WordNet query tries to return over 64 kb of text back Windows steps in and stops its execution since it would be possible to corrupt memory used by other programs.

This bug isn't limited to sister terms but sister term queries usually return more words then other functions. The word "Life" has 13 different senses and over 1000 sister terms between the senses. Listing all these words out doesn't fit in the 64 kb limit so the program crashes.

It should be a fairly quick fix if I take the easy way out. Rather then increasing the limit past 64 kb, I think I'll just have it stop looking up more words once it reaches 64 kb. Once a query reaches a point where it returns close to a thousand words I don't believe leaving a few words out will matter much.

I'll try to have a fix out as soon as possible, I estimate under 2 weeks. The fix will be pretty small and easy to install using the Ultra Hal plug-in installer.