We make human-like personalities for Internet and embedded applications. Our specialty is conversation using human behavior and realism. We've received international awards and acclaim for our bots that can pass for human.
"Shadow owes its birth to light" -- John Gay
Albert One
The computer system that won the 1998 and 1999 Loebner Prize Medal has a newsletter and blog. "Most Human Computer" - 2001 Guinness Book of World Records. Albert now lives in Cedartown, Georgia, USA.
Some parts of Albert were deployed on the internet beginning in 1995, to gather information about what kinds of things people would say to a chatterbot. Another element of Albert One involved the building of a large database of human statements, and associated replies. This portion of the project was tested at the 1994-1997 Loebner Prize contests.
Albert was the first of Robby Garner's multifaceted bots. The Albert One system was composed of several subsystems. Among those were a version of Eliza, the therapist, Elivs, another Eliza-like bot, and several other helper applications working together in a hierarchical arrangement. As a continuation of the stimulus-response library, various other database queries and assertions were tested to arrive at each of Albert's responses. Robby went on to develop networked examples of this kind of hierarchical "glue" at The Turing Hub.
Institute of Mimetic Sciences announces it has signed Frank Fuller to the IMS record label. Frank is a pianist and will be recording his original works. Here's his Demo.
(03.05.22) Flux Oersted has released a single called Flint on Steel It was originaly part of an unfinished album we were calling "Steel and You." It is available from Apple Music and Deezer so far. We will update here as it spreads.
(08.10.22) Flux Oersted begins work on an album built from the sound up. "The artistic choices available today are so varied and intense, it is kind of overwhelming." -- Robby Garner
Some History
Flux Oersted started as a recording project by Robby Garner. Around 1988 we became a band featuring Sam Hancock on keyboards and Tommy Roberson on bass. We've forked a new band called The Phalse Prophets that features Dutch Cartoonist and Zaa Phafalene.
When Sam Hancock and Robby Garner first met, there was a thriving original music scene in Rome Georgia, and some of it was quite good. The Reprehensibles, The Dirt Dobbers, Psychedelic Horse Doctors, Heart of Facts, and many more were around at that time, in that part of the world. So all this music was being written and performed in local venues. It was in the late 1980's so the Internet had not become widely known then. Our collective energies were mainly spent on the performances, as it was more expensive if not impossible to save them, except maybe to a cassette tape recorded off the mix board or something like that. I ran sound for the Reprehensibles, Kada Kada, and the odd fill in for another sound man if they were sick. So what were the odds that Robby Garner would meet Sam Hancock? Thanks to Clay Broome for introducing us.
Sam had a studio in Rome back then called Machine Sounds Studio. He had all these odd furniture that had been cast off from a local hospital, and enough equipment to begin recording 4-track tapes, and making computer sequences that we wrote to control our musical equipment. Our influences were very similar and we had no trouble thinking of new songs to learn or program. But we kept writing our own of course. Our music was in a different vein than that of our friends but it was overall a very supportive environment for the arts. I was in Kada Kada, Uno Ya, and Flux Oersted. I was also in Edgar Allen and the Poe Boys, A Presence Called Fred, and The Dick Names, but let's stick to bands that played more than one time together.
Flux Oersted is now embarking on a new journey to become signed by an official record label, The Institute of Mimetic Sciences. This will be tantamount to Harry Potter being published by Scholastic. We are located in Cedartown Georgia USA. Our company will be a unique local Employer, and will support the Cedartown community in the arts as well as technology and tax revenue.
Robitron's expertise with Turing level conversational software gives them a clear advantage in making conversational companions using mimetic synthesis and verbal behavior.
"Life is a cabaret old chum.
Come to the cabaret!"
