Acuitas Diary #58 (March 2023)

This is going to be one of those months when my diary is short and boring, because I've been busy laying foundations and have little that is finished to talk about or demonstrate. I worked on two things - continued improvements to the Narrative module, and the beginnings of Narrative game-playing.

Photo by Spc. Anthony Zane, public domain

The Narrative improvements cover continued work on character motivation, as well as some bug fixes. I added some capacity to interpret "because" statements as commentary about goals. E.g. a statement like "John decided to flee the battle because he wanted to live" supplies a motive for the instrumental goal of fleeing the battle, which (to Acuitas at least) might not be immediately obvious otherwise. 

I also tweaked Narrative's built-in tiny ontology a bit. Distinctions are made, for modeling and processing purposes, between "agents" (individuals that can reasonably act as characters in a story), "objects," "locations," and "organizations." I realized I needed to add another category, for abstract nouns or "concepts," when I noticed that a "purpose" was being treated as a physical object. Whoops! I also decided to add a "system" category, to cover such entities as computer networks. At first I was thinking of a network as a "location," but I realized that it's more than that.

Now, for game-playing! I am very excited about this. The goal it to make Acuitas capable of navigating "text adventure" style games by leveraging a lot of the existing narrative and reasoning capabilities. Given the machinery for modeling characters in stories, and predicting what they may do, it is not such a difficult step to imagine *oneself* as one of those characters, and then decide how to interact with the environment ... I'm also hoping that experimenting in these game scenarios will give me ideas for how to improve the main Executive module.

I actually sketched out the code to support roleplaying earlier this year, and just began integrating it this month. I was hoping to have something demo-worthy, but the process took longer than I'd hoped and thus is still in progress. So hopefully I'll have some more interesting and concrete details to share within the next month or two. I've gotten so far as to get Acuitas to register a character that is "his," and to log issues for that character - but I haven't wrung out enough bugs yet to even get through a full input-output loop. More info coming later!

Until the next cycle,
Jenny