Forth and AI revisited: BRAIN.FORTH

ABSTRACT

Six years ago in this journal we discussed the work of Arthur T. Murray, who endeavored to explore artificial intelligence using the Forth programming language [1]. His creation, which he called MIND.FORTH, was interesting in its ability to understand English sentences in the form: subject-verb-object. It also had the capacity to learn new things and to form mental associations between recent experiences and older memories. In the intervening years, Mr. Murray has continued to develop his MIND.FORTH: he has translated it into Visual BASIC, PERL and Javascript, he has written a book [2] on the subject, and he maintains a wiki web site where anyone may suggest changes or extensions to his design [3]. MIND.FORTH is necessarily complex and opaque by virtue of its functionality; therefore it may be challenging for a newcomer to grasp. However, the more dedicated student will find much of value in this code. Murray himself has become quite a controversial figure.

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