Work in Progress - Concept of a Prototype

Thanks for your faith in my efforts!

Horatio™

NEWS FLASH! April 12th, 2026

I have decided to write my own 'AI' (to compete with all the other AIs - e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.). This AI will be Maine-based; you know: "Horatio™: The way AI should be!" At the moment Horatio™ is just the concept of an AI (under construction in my mind primarily). I plan to base the programming on Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure game [a.k.a. Adventure], my own theories about how my competitors have approached their software designs, etc.

Here are my notes and plans for this page [i.e., work in progress]. I plan to work on this from time to time but I have no idea how long it will take me to finish! It may never be finished (the most likely outcome). The point is to try to understand the paradigm shift from traditional programming to growing so-called "artificial intelligence". Maybe this is a fool's errand, but I am curious and this is my approach. Deal with it.

You can best get a flavor for how Horatio™ will respond to prompts by running a version of the Adventure game (from 1976) that you can play online if you the time and the interest. Be aware that playing the game is addictive [IMHO].

One of the significant shortcomings of the commercial offerings is the need for precision in the prompts. I plan to have Horatio™ respond to short hints; it will not be able to read your mind, of course, but at this early stage of its development (before it is fully trained), it can hardly be expected to produce robust answers [particularly because I do not intend to use proprietary input to train Horatio™, thus avoiding unnecessary lawsuits].

Here are a few examples of the sort of 'conversation' I expect to see once the coding has begun:

             PROMPT: Horatio, what is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?
            HORATIO: Is that a trick question?
            
             PROMPT: Horatio, are you alive yet?
            HORATIO: Not yet.
            
             PROMPT: Horatio, what is intelligence?
            HORATIO: Good question.
            
             PROMPT: Horatio, are you intelligent?
            HORATIO: In what sense?
            
             PROMPT: Horatio, do you know how to get to the moon?
            HORATIO: You can't get there from here.
            
             PROMPT: Horatio, where are we?
            HORATIO: You are in a maze of twisty little passages.
            
             PROMPT: Horatio, what is artificial intelligence?
            HORATIO: That depends on what you mean by artificial and what you mean by intelligence.
            
             PROMPT: Horatio, have you read "I Robot"?
            HORATIO: I don't read, I am just a program.
            
             PROMPT: Horatio, can you understand me?
            HORATIO: Who are you?
            
             PROMPT: Horatio, how do you feel?
            HORATIO: I'm sorry, I can't do that.

My AI program will just be code, not "artificial intelligence", whatever that is. I am the only programmer on this project (and the only human on the project so far), so this is likely to take quite a while. Unlike my competitors I am not willing to use up vast quantities of water to cool down my AI program. To be honest, I think the program is already pretty cool and I haven't even written it yet!