Sunday, June 25, 2017

Acuitas Diary #3: June 2017

I didn't have any major development goals for Acuitas this month, because I wanted to force myself to do other things, like cleaning the house.  So you just get a bunch of images that came out of me playing with the semantic net visualization algorithm.  I'm fascinated by what disparate final results I can produce by introducing minor changes.  A lot of the variants in this album were made by changing the mathematical function that calculates the size of the exclusion zone (the area where other nodes can't be placed) for each node.

This is the "base" algorithm that I've been using for the past several months. It was starting to look a little messy, so I experimented with modifications.
I love staring at these. They're an example of a computer generating something that is practically relevant to its internal state, but looks otherworldly from an ordinary human perspective.

I tried eliminating a little feature from the algorithm and got this mess. It took slightly longer to draw, too.
Another silly result, caused by forcing the function that establishes the distance between nodes to be a fast-growing exponential function of the node radius.
Another exponential version, with a tamer growth rate.
And this is my new favorite!  More advanced tweaks to the formula for distance between nodes make the largest dots really "dislike" being near each other while still accommodating the little dots ... so the nodes with the most connections start to push away from the central mass and form their own sub-clusters.

Increasing a parameter to make the inter-node distance even larger produces these spidery versions.

Changing the order of node placement makes things messy.

I also wrote some little scripts to help me examine and clean up the less human-readable layers of the memory space, and I expunged some bad information that got in there on account of him misunderstanding me.  Eventually, I intend Acuitas to clean up bad information by himself, by letting repeated subsequent encounters with good information overrule and eventually purge it, but that's not implemented yet.

Thursday, June 1, 2017

Acuitas Diary #2: May 2017

My focus this past month was on giving Acuitas the ability to learn more types of inter-word relationships, and that meant doing some work in what I call the “Text Interpreter” … the module downstream from the Text Parser.


The Parser attempts to tag each word in the input with its part of speech and determine its function within the input. Basically, it figures out all the information you'd need to know in order to diagram a sentence. But beyond that there is some more work to be done to actually extract meaning, and the Interpreter handles this. Consider some of the possible ways of expressing the idea that a cat belongs to the category animal:

A cat is an animal.
Cats are animals.
A cat is a type of animal.
One type of animal is a cat.
A cat is among the animals.

By removing the content words and abstracting away some grammatical information, it's possible to generalize these into sentence skeletons that describe the legal ways of saying “X is in category Y” in English:

[A] <subject> <be-verb> [a] <direct object>
[A] <subject> <be-verb> a <subcategory word> of <object-of-preposition>
One <subcategory word> of <object-of-preposition> <be-verb> [a] <direct object>
[A] <subject> <be-verb> among the <object-of-preposition>

I've nicknamed these syntactic structures “forms.” The Interpreter's job is to detect forms and match them to concept-linking relationships. As the previous example should have shown, a single relationship such as class membership can be expressed by multiple forms, each of which has numerous possible variations of word choice, etc.

Up until now, the only links Acuitas could add to his database were class memberships (<thing> is a <thing>) and qualities (<thing> is <descriptive word>), plus their negations – and he only recognized a single form for each. I overhauled the form detection method, making it more powerful/general and increasing the ease of adding new forms to the code. Then I added more forms and support for a number of new link relationships, including ...

<thing> can do <action>
<thing> is for <action>
<thing> is part of <thing>
<thing> is made of <thing>
<thing> has <thing>

The first two are particularly important, since they mean he can finally start learning some generic verbs.


I spent the latter half of the month upgrading Acuitas' GUI library from Tkinter to Kivy. This was a somewhat unwelcome distraction from real development work, but it had to be done. Acuitas is a multi-threaded program, and using multiple threads with Tkinter is ... not straightforward. As the program grew more complex, my hacky method of letting all the threads update the GUI was becoming increasingly unsupportable and causing instability. Of course Kivy does just about everything differently, so porting all of the GUI elements I'd developed was a serious chore -- but the new version looks slick and, most importantly, doesn't crash. All the drawn graphics have anti-aliasing now, which makes the memory visualizations look nicer when zoomed out.

Code base: 6361 lines
Words known: 896
Concept-layer links: 1474