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.