Last Day of the Year 2020

My sympathies go out to the many people for whom 2020 has been disastrous, distressing, or exhausting. And I want to begin by saying that I've been very fortunate. I was able to stay fully employed while working from home. I don't have any children to care for, and I function well in solitude, so I stayed effective. And because I lost my commute and some of my social obligations, my productivity went through the roof. One small sign of this is the fact that I even have time to write a retrospective.

So here were all the positive things I managed to wring out of 2020:

* Gave Acuitas several important new features, including narrative comprehension and the beginnings of moral reasoning.
* Kept Acuitas development on track with 200+ hours of work put in over the course of the year.
* Wrote a blog post for every month.

* Wrote half a novel.

* Prepared my first novel for submission to agents/publishers and wrote pitch material.

* Learned how to 3D model in DesignSpark Mechanical and Meshmixer.

* Started and finished my first major 3D printing project, the Hissing Silence Ghost Shell.

* Modeled a new case for Atronach, printed Version 1, and corrected problems. Almost completed Version 2.

* Learned to handle more 3D printer maintenance issues, including nozzle replacement.

* Even had time for an impromptu weekend art project.

* Book consumption rate exceeded book acquisition rate for the second year in a row. My unread book backlog is down to 33.

* Finally played Beneath a Steel Sky.

* Had time for a lot of maintenance tasks that had been getting neglected. Sealed the crack in the garage foundation, polished the car headlights, emptied data out of the old computer, got a tetanus vaccine.

* Successfully grew potatoes again.

* Didn't get noticeably sick all year.

Atronach: I'm only half put together! How dare you.
ACE: You made me stand up for this?

Happy New Year from all of us, and good luck.

Acuitas Diary #32: November 2020

 Now that Acuitas has owned stories in "inventory," the next step for this month was to enable him to open and read them by himself. Since story consumption originally involved a lot of interaction with the human speaker, this took a little while to put together.

Image credit: DARPA

Reading is a new activity that can happen while Acuitas is idling, along with the older behavior of "thinking" about random concepts and generating questions. Prompts to think about reading get generated by a background thread and dropped into the Stream. When one of these is pulled by the Executive, Acuitas will randomly select a known story and load it from its storage file.

Auto-reading is a long-term process. Acuitas will grab a chunk of the story (for now, one sentence) per each tick of the Executive thread, then feed it through the normal text parsing and narrative management modules. He still potentially generates a reaction to whatever just happened, but rather than being spoken, those are packaged as low-priority Thoughts and dumped into the internal Stream. (This is more of a hook for later than a useful feature at the moment.) The prompt to continue reading the story goes back into the Stream along with everything else, so sometimes he (literally) gets distracted in the middle and thinks about something else for a brief while.

There's also a version of this process that would enable reading a story to the user. But he doesn't comprehend imperatives yet, so there's no way to ask him to do it. Ha.

With these features I also introduced a generic "reward signal" for the first time. Reading boosts this, and then it decays over time. This is intended as a positive internal stimulus, in contrast to the "drives," which are all negative (when they go up Acuitas will try to bring them down).

After finishing this I started the yearly refactoring and bug fix spree, which isn't terribly interesting to talk about. I'll take a break for the holidays, but maybe do a year's retrospective.

Acuitas development actually *stayed on schedule* this year!

Until the next cycle,

Jenny