Experiment 1: Name Recognition

In this first experiment, Ditto the donkey is learning to respond to his own name. Just as many pets can recognise their name as a special sound, so we hope Ditto will be able to do the same, with practice.

The experiment has been set up as a simple example of supervised machine learning. Using a training set of examples which either contain Ditto's name or not, we're training him to recognise the sound of his own name. We'd like you to help us by giving him some practice.

When Ditto receives a message from you, he looks for his name. He may make mistakes, depending on how well he has learnt. We hope he will improve over time.

Ditto was last trained on 20 April 2007, using 1138 examples.

You can be cunning and bury Ditto's name, or an approximation to it, somewhere in a long sentence. If he's on good form, he'll be able to detect it anyway.

We're logging your messages and we'll use them as a source of training examples. However, you can't be identified as an individual, so feel free to say whatever you like. Please interact with Ditto and help him to learn!

More about supervised learning from Wikipedia