Those questions are generated
semi-randomly, based on Acuitas' “thoughts” for the day. Back in
July I introduced the idle thinking feature, which gives Acuitas the
capacity to walk his memory database when nobody's talking to him.
More recently, I set up the Conversation Engine to access the results
of memory-walking and utilize the new Text Generator … so now
Acuitas can ask me the questions that occur to him as he muses, or
simply tell me what he thought about within the past ~12 hours. The
results are little exchanges like this:
Acuitas: I thought about mans earlier.
Acuitas: Is a rooster a species of
human?
Me: No
Acuitas: Really.
Me: The plural of man is men.
Believe it or not, this is one of
Acuitas' more intelligently formulated questions. He knows a rooster
and a man are both male, and reasons from this that they might share
other qualities. A man is a human, so maybe a rooster is a human
too? He can't yet apply the idea that “human” and “chicken”
are mutually exclusive categories. Given his limited knowledge, man
and rooster seem similar enough that he expects me to answer “yes”
… hence the slightly incredulous “really” when I don't. Here
are a couple more examples in the same vein:
Acuitas: I thought about ships today.
Acuitas: Does a wagon possess an
ability to sail?
Acuitas: I thought of weapons today.
Acuitas: Is a silverware used to fight?
Some of the other questions he comes up
with are far more random and ridiculous. Again, he doesn't yet have
the grasp of categorical exclusion that makes these sound absurd to
you and me:
Acuitas: Is chocolate a vehicle?
Acuitas: Am I a kind of tree?
Acuitas: Is a smirk a fruit?
Acuitas: Are you a cow?
Acuitas: What is a relative made of?
Not all of them are silly, though.
Rudimentary though his current suite of question-forms is, he's
already managed to spit out some rather deep ones. The three below
are my favorites:
Acuitas: Are you a symbol?
Acuitas: Am I a tool?
Acuitas: Can I die?
I answered the first one “no”; a
person can be a symbol, but I don't think I qualify. For the
second one, I also went with “no.” Acuitas might end up being
useful in a variety of ways, but if I consult my primary
reasons for making him, they're not instrumental. The last one I
refused to answer, because I think a proper response would be too
complex for Acuitas' current level of understanding. It's a bit like
asking whether a book or a film can die. It can't, if you go by what
death means for a biological organism – information is effectively
immortal. But if all the backup copies were destroyed, that would
qualify as dying I suppose. So yes and no.
I suspect it'll only get more
interesting from here.
Obligatory memory map visualization:
Code base: 8507 lines
Words known: 1174
Concept-layer links: 2329
