Some of the things I did last month felt incomplete, so I pushed aside my original schedule (already) and spent this month cleaning them up and fleshing them out.
I mentioned in the last diary that I wanted the "consider getting help" reasoning that I added in the narrative module to also be available to the Executive, so that Acuitas could do this, not just speculate about story characters doing it. Acuitas doesn't have much in the way of reasons to want help yet ... but I wanted to have this ready for when he does. It's a nice mirror for the "process imperatives" code I put in last month ... he's now got the necessary hooks to take orders *and* give them.
To that end, I set up some structures that are very similar to what the narrative code uses for keeping track of characters' immediate objectives or problems. Acuitas can (eventually) use these for keeping tabs on his own issues. (For testing, I injected a couple of items into them with a backdoor command.) When something is in issue-tracking and the Executive thread gets an idle moment, it will run problem-solving on it. If the result ends up being something in the Executive's list of selectable actions, Acuitas will do it immediately; if a specific action comes up, but it's not something he can do, he will store the idea until a familiar agent comes along to talk to him. Then he'll tell *them* to do the thing. The conversation handler anticipates some sort of agree/disagree response to this, and tries to detect it and determine the sentiment. Whether the speaker consents to help then feeds back into whether the problem is considered "solved."
Another new feature is the ability to send additional facts (not from the database) into the reasoning functions, or even pipe in "negative facts" that *prevent* facts from the database from being used. This has two important purposes: 1) easily handle temporary or situational information, such as propositions that are only true in a specific story, without writing it to the database, and 2) model the knowledge space of other minds, including missing information and false information.
This in turn helped me make some of the narrative code tidier and more robust, so I rounded out my time doing that.
Until the next cycle,
Jenny
