FreeHAL
FreeHAL@home (also written FreeHAL@Home or listed in statistics as FreeHAL) was a completed BOINC volunteer computing project that generated and converted fact and relationship databases (semantic networks) for FreeHAL, an open-source self-learning chatbot.[1][2] The desktop program (originally named JEliza) was written to imitate human conversation in German and English. After more than six years of mostly active development, the software project was discontinued in 2012; the BOINC servers last published statistics in April 2013 and never recovered from a database crash.[3][4]
History
The program began around 2006 as JEliza. The name combined Java, the first implementation language, with ELIZA, Joseph Weizenbaum's 1966 conversation simulator.[5][2] Early releases (including Python, Perl, and Qt builds) were hosted at Gna!.[3] Heise listed JEliza 2.2.2 as a 6.77 MB GNU-GPL download for Windows and Linux.[6]
In May 2008 the project was renamed FreeHAL after the language mix no longer matched the leading "J", and in homage to HAL 9000 from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.[2][7] Lead developer Tobias Schulz remained the principal author, maintainer, and BOINC administrator throughout the project's life.[2][1]
BOINC first listed FreeHAL@home on 26 September 2008.[4] Volunteers attached with the project URL http://www.freehal.net/freehal_at_home/ (participants were warned to avoid the alternate host boinc.freehal.org during launch).[8]
From August 2010 the Swiss cloud provider CloudSigma donated servers used for both the chatbot and the BOINC project. On 27 February 2011 Schulz announced that CloudSigma would continue that support for another twelve months; on 1 May 2011 he reported that CloudSigma would not extend the agreement. SETI.Germany and Planet 3DNow! members had also sponsored servers, and Elton Chung of ReactOS donated a download mirror.[1][9]
The last numbered desktop release commonly cited is Step 6 (8 April 2011).[2] German Wikipedia records source revision 1447 dated 2 June 2012.[7] An Android client appeared on Google Play in June 2012 (answers computed on remote servers). A Java port intended for Android and desktop was started in September 2012.[3] The official site later stated that after more than six years of mostly active development the project had been discontinued in 2012.[3]
On 7 April 2013 a database server crash took FreeHAL@home offline. An offline notice said there was no way to access the project while recovery was attempted with the server donors.[10] BOINCstats last ingested user and team XML on 7 April 2013 and host XML on 6 April 2013.[4] Combined-statistics maintainers later retired the listing after the servers had been offline for nearly a year.[11]
Goals
The FreeHAL project's mission was to develop an open-source program that "very closely imitates human conversation."[1][3] FreeHAL@home existed so that large public semantic nets could be parsed and converted into the fact and relationship graphs used by that program. Those conversions were described as time-consuming and embarrassingly parallel, so they were packaged as BOINC workunits for volunteer hosts.[1][12]
Unlike scripted commercial chatbots of the period, FreeHAL was advertised as learning on its own while talking to people over the keyboard, growing a knowledge database rather than only matching canned patterns.[2][13]
Software architecture
FreeHAL was a client–server system. A server (called the kernel in project documentation) handled understanding and generation. Front ends included a cross-platform Qt graphical user interface, a text client, a PHP web interface used on the project homepage, and later the Android app.[5][1] Several users could train one shared installation over the network.[5]
Licensing was GNU GPL version 3 or later.[3] Supported operating systems included Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, Unix, BSD, and Mac OS X, with Android added in 2012.[2][3] Implementation languages shifted over time from Java to Perl and then C++, with Python and PHP used for earlier and web components; a later Java port was begun in 2012.[5][7][3] Knowledge was stored in an SQLite database.[5] Speech synthesis used MPlayer for playback and an online synthesizer operated by Schulz.[5] Source code, issue tracking, and later documentation live under the freehal GitHub organization and Schulz's personal GitHub account.[3]
How conversation worked
From the computer's point of view a turn had three repeating stages: understand the human input, retrieve or infer an answer, and emit natural language.[5] The stack combined:
- a stemmer to reduce inflected forms to stems;
- a part-of-speech tagger to label grammatical roles;
- pattern recognition over the resulting tokens;
- part-of-speech databases;
- a semantic network of facts and relations;
- Hidden Markov models for statistical interpretation.[2][5]
A simple first-order HMM used for tagging or sequence interpretation can be written with hidden states , observations , transitions , and emissions :
The Viterbi recurrence that recovers the most likely tag or dialog-state path is
Facts learned in conversation were stored as nodes and edges so the kernel could draw conclusions that had not been typed in as isolated sentences.[5] By late 2008 the public German demo already held more than 800,000 German terms and almost 200,000 relations, versus about 20,000 English words and 80,000 English relations; German remained the only language with a large semantic net.[5][7]
Linux Magazine noted typical limits of the era: confused word order, tense, number, and case; occasional infinite loops while learning that required wiping the database; and crashes, though day-to-day reliability was described as fairly good.[5]
FreeHAL@home on BOINC
Workunits converted open semantic-net dumps into FreeHAL's internal fact/relation format.[12] Because the application often used only a small fraction of one CPU (community reports put the useful work at a few seconds, then a long sleep so a unit lasted on the order of 90 minutes plus a random extra interval averaging about 10 minutes), it was commonly run alongside other BOINC projects. A relatively new BOINC Manager was required so non-CPU-intensive FreeHAL tasks could run concurrently with ordinary CPU work. Typical reported memory use was about 11–12 MB per instance (ranging roughly 1–65 MB). Community analysis of hal2009-boinc.cpp described a grant on the order of 12 credits per completed unit.[13][14]
In June 2009 Schulz posted server messages explaining that simultaneous in-flight work had jumped from 10,000–30,000 units in May to almost 200,000, overwhelming the project server.[15] Monthly hosting was later said to cost about 80 currency units for bandwidth and traffic, and the project appealed for donations.[12]
Applications were CPU-only. Platforms advertised over the project's life included Windows, Linux, and other Unix-like systems used by the chatbot itself.[2]
Project statistics
BOINCstats classifies the project under Artificial intelligence and records these lifetime figures after the final XML export of April 2013:[4]
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| First seen | 26 September 2008 |
| Total credit | 3,680,102,220 |
| Users (all time) | 18,006 |
| Hosts (all time) | 63,407 |
| Teams | 798 |
| Active users / hosts (today) | 0 / 0 |
| RAC | 0 |
| Contribution to combined BOINC credit | about 0.0077% |
A May 2012 snapshot (while the project was still granting credit) listed about 14,600 users (2,763 active), 52,331 hosts (6,878 active), 680 teams, RAC of 2,448,500, and about 12.24 TFLOPS of equivalent throughput.[16]
Awards and reception
In 2008 FreeHAL won first prize in the Most Popular category of the international Chatterbox Challenge.[2][17]
As JEliza it appeared on the cover CD/DVD of the German magazine com! Das Computer-Magazin in issues 4/2008 and 5/2008 and was listed among that month's Top-10 open-source programs.[7][18] Linux Magazine issue 97 (December 2008) devoted a projects column to FreeHAL, placing it in the lineage of the Turing test and describing stemmers, taggers, HMMs, SQLite storage, and the BOINC subproject.[5] LinuxCommunity likewise highlighted the 2008 Chatterbox win and the research aim of simulating linguistic intelligence.[19]
Volunteer forums (Ars Technica, BOINC, SETI.Germany, Planet 3DNow!) treated FreeHAL@home as a light "sidecar" project. Some crunchers liked the credit-to-CPU ratio; others questioned whether the sleep-padded workunits did useful science.[13]
Publications
No peer-reviewed paper authored by the FreeHAL team was located in major indexes. Contemporary and later publications that discuss the program include:
- Carsten Schnober, "Projects on the Move," Linux Magazine 97 (December 2008), pp. 94–95. Feature on FreeHAL's NLP pipeline, knowledge sizes, client–server design, and FreeHAL@home.[5]
- com! Das Computer-Magazin, issues 4/2008 and 5/2008: JEliza on the magazine disc and in the monthly Top-10 open-source list.[7]
- Mikic, Burguillo, Peleteiro, and Rey-López, "Using Tags In An AIML-based Chatterbot To Improve Its Knowledge," Computer Science 13 (2) 2012, pp. 123 ff. Cited in the German Wikipedia literature list for FreeHAL.[7]
- English and German Wikipedia articles, and the DBpedia extraction of the English article.[2][20]
Legacy
Code, old Gna! homepage mirrors, 2008 screenshots (Ubuntu 7.04 and OS X 10.4.10), and historical downloads remain on freehal.github.io.[3] The BOINC attach URL and live servers are gone. Lifetime credit and host counts are preserved at BOINCstats.[4] FreeHAL is still listed among historical volunteer-computing and chatbot projects on Wikipedia's lists of AI and BOINC-related software.[2]
See also
External links
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 FreeHAL@home. freehal.net. Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 FreeHAL. Wikipedia. Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 About FreeHAL. freehal.github.io. Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 FreeHAL - Detailed stats. BOINCstats/BAM!. Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ 5.00 5.01 5.02 5.03 5.04 5.05 5.06 5.07 5.08 5.09 5.10 5.11 5.12 Template:Cite magazine
- ↑ JEliza 2.2.2. Heise (project mirror). Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 FreeHAL. German Wikipedia. Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ Les sites des projets. BOINC-AF. Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ FreeHAL@home. freehal.net. Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ (12 June 2013).Freehal: Really?. WUProp@Home forums. Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ FreeHal@Home. BOINC Combined Statistics. Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 FreeHAL - free software artificial intelligence. freehal.net. Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 (January 2010).FreeHAL@home. Ars Technica OpenForum. Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ (24 July 2011).Thread 'Free Hal project.'. BOINC forums. Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ (2009).Forum::The Projects::FreeHAL@home. BOINCstats. Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ BOINCstats FreeHAL graph. BOINCstats. Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ The Chatterbox Challenge. Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ Top-10 des Monats. com!. Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ (1 September 2008).FreeHAL - Die neue Gattung maschineller Intelligenz. LinuxCommunity. Retrieved 24 August 2026.
- ↑ About: FreeHAL. DBpedia. Retrieved 24 August 2026.