I haven't written a diary in a while
because most of what I've done over the past two months has been code
refactoring and fixing bugs, which isn't all that interesting. A new
feature that I just got in … finally … is the ability to infer
some topic-to-topic relationships that aren't explicitly stored
in the memory. For instance, many of the links stored in memory are
“is-type-of” relations. Acuitas can now make the assumption that
a subtype inherits all attributes of its super-type. If a shark is a
fish and a fish can swim, then a shark can swim; if an oak is a tree
and a tree has a trunk, an oak has a trunk. If a car is a vehicle, a
house is a building, and a vehicle is not a building, then cars are
not houses. Acuitas can also now make inferences based on transitive
relationships, like “is part of”: if a crankshaft is part of an
engine and an engine is part of a car, then a crankshaft is part of a
car. The ability to easily make inferences like these is one of the
strengths of the semantic net memory organization – starting from
the concept you're interested in, you can just keep following links
until you find what you need (or hit a very fundamental root concept,
like “object”).
Acuitas should ask fewer ridiculous
questions with this feature in place. He still comes up with those,
but now he can answer some of them himself, as in this quote:
“I thought of lambs earlier. I
concluded that piglets are pigs.”
Recent memory map visualization:
 |
| The huge dot toward the top of the memory map is Acuitas' self-concept; the second-largest one, toward the lower left, is "human." The concepts representing me and "animal" are the two third-tier dots toward the middle right. |
Code base: 9454 lines (it went down!)
Words known: 1839
Concept-layer links: 5202
