Acuitas Diary #11: April 2018

Acuitas Diary #11 (April 2018)

This month's big objective was to get some use out of the sleep cycle that I implemented last month. I re-purposed the question-generating process so that, while Acuitas is sleeping, it roams the memory looking for redundant links and other problems.

What's a redundant link? Now that Acuitas has a bit of logical inference ability, some relationships in the database imply others. So the retention of one piece of information might be rendered unnecessary by the later addition of some broader fact. Here are a few examples (I culled these from the log that the memory crawler prints out):

The link (fang, has_purpose, bite) is redundant because the link (tooth, has_purpose, bite) exists.

The link (father, has_item, child) is redundant because the link (parent, has_item, child) exists.

The link (pot, can_have_qual, empty) is redundant because the link (container, can_have_qual, empty) exists.

The link (baby, can_do_action, destroy) is redundant because the link (human, can_do_action, destroy) exists.

Mopping up these unnecessary links helps consolidate the information known, reduce the total size of the database, and possibly make the memory visualization a little less messy.

Eventually, I might want to refine this process so that it doesn't necessarily remove every redundant link. There could be some frequently-used shortcuts that justify their use of storage space by improving search speed. One might want to tailor the aggressiveness of the link-pruning based on the amount of storage available … but that's all for later.

While working on this, I discovered some other nasties that I'm calling “inheritance loops.” Redundant links bloat the database but are otherwise harmless; inheritance loops contain actual garbage information, introduced either by learning bugs or by someone* telling Acuitas something stupid.

*I'm the only person who talks to him right now, so this means me.

Here's an example of an inheritance loop:

cat <is-a> animal

animal <is-a> organism

organism <is-a> cat

Oops! Unless all these words are synonyms, you know one of these triples is wrong. (I can't think, at this point, of any cases in which I'd want to use circular inheritance.) On his own, Acuitas doesn't know which. If the crawler finds an inheritance loop, he might ask a user to confirm those links when he's next awake and in conversation. If the user contradicts one of the relationships, he'll break the corresponding link, removing the loop.

I also moved generation of the memory visualization into the sleep phase. Every so often, instead of checking out more links, the process stops to compute a new layout for all the dots, taking into account the latest modification of the database. This is a fairly computation-intensive process, so it's something I definitely don't want running when he's active. It used to happen once when Acuitas was launched, which made for long startup times and meant that the visualization might not get updated for days.

Lastly, I put in some code to save Acuitas' current state when the program is shut down. It also gets automatically stored every so often, in case the program experiences a hard crash that prevents the on-close routines from running. Previously, on restart all the drives would reset to zero, any current thoughts or recently generated questions would be discarded, etc. Now all those things are preserved and reloaded when the program starts up again, which gives him a bit more continuity, I guess.

Recent memory map visualization (I decided to go with a zoom this month):

Code base: 10459 lines

Words known: 1981

Concept-layer links: 5730