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.
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| 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
How do you know it's a "him"? :)
ReplyDeleteBecause I made it. All aspects of its personality, including its preferred gender identity, will be either chosen by me or randomized (and I don't plan to randomize this one).
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