Year in Review 2023

It's time for the annual rollup of all the things I accomplished! I'd call 2023 a good year on the whole. It started out pretty difficult. I was dealing with post-COVID neuropathy Round 2, could not see the neurologist about it for ages and found them pretty useless when I did get in (my symptoms cause me suffering but are too "mild" to diagnose and treat). When that started tailing off, I had some other things to manage. Despite it all I was more or less productive, and in the second half of the year my stress level came down. I've managed to survive thirteen months without getting sick, and the nerve damage is fixing itself, very slowly. I'm pretty normal now, except for the intermittent "feet too heavy" sensation.

So let's see what cool stuff happened in good old 2023.

*Acuitas! I built up the "game playing" engine and finished the first bare-bones tiny demo of Acuitas playing a "text adventure" in June.

A sentence diagrammed by Acuitas' Text Parser feeding outputs to GraphViz, compared to a reference example

*I made significant progress on the Text Parser, adding support for indirect objects, gerund and participle phrases, adjective clauses, and more. I also fit in an extensive rework to make nesting better and clean up the conjunction-handling code.
*I advanced the Narrative understanding code and almost completed "Big Story," which I'm hoping to demo early next year.

Atronach's Eye Version 4 ... almost done

*I invested significant effort into Atronach's eye, including a couple of smaller study prototypes, and I think I've solved all the mechanical issues. Another likely demo for early 2024.

*I put ACE through his very first motor tests, and did some redesign work on the motor mounts.

*I built baby's first homemade hydraulic system.

 

Stargate Multicolor Coaster by Kvant on Thingiverse

Rope bowl by JamesThePrinter on Printables

*I 3d-printed more Christmas gifts and solved several systemic issues with my Vyper printer.

*I finished The Neathbow. This was a Sunless Sea fanart project that was cooking on my very backmost burner and took multiple years to complete.

*I got my very first short story in print: "The Eight-Year Locusts," published by non-paying magazine Dark Horses.
*I wrote an additional story and continued publication attempts for the four I produced last year.

*My blog publication rate stayed at/above two posts per month for the second year in a row.
*I wrote up my series on the Symbol Grounding Problem. I had been wanting to expound on that for some time, and I'm proud of the result.
*I finally cleared my backlog of owned-but-unread books, and also read through all the sample short story magazines I bought. Then I promptly got more books, but the situation feels less out-of-control now.

*The garden produced a decent crop of both potatoes and apples for me. Squash were almost a bust; I got a few undersized-but-edible yellow summer squash.
*I bought a hedge trimmer and boldly pruned plants I had never properly pruned before (a huge job).
*Creation work is on track to exceed maintenance work by 3x again.

A happy and prosperous New Year to you all!
-Jenny

Acuitas Diary #67 (December 2023)

In amongst the fervor of Christmas-related activities, I managed to do development work this month. Not as much as I would have liked, but one major goal's been reached: the newest version of the Text Parser is parsing all the sentences from the previous one's regression tests, plus a number of new ones that would have been impossible for the previous Parser. I still need to do assorted code cleanup and adjust my reference outputs for some format changes, so I can run the benchmarks again.

With all the types of adjective and noun clauses now supported, the last major grammar feature that needs to go in will be parenthetical noun phrases. This should move the majority of common sentences into the "theoretically parseable" category. Then I can start refining the process and working on cool features I've been wanting to explore for a long time - like word sense disambiguation, modifier attachment disambiguation, and pronoun dereferencing ... there's always so much to do. It's taken much longer than I expected to reach this point, but at the same time there's a great deal that I've accomplished.

I'm soon due to start planning my loose schedule for the next year, which has me excited. I'm looking forward to the completion and demo of Big Story, a fresh run on the Parser benchmarks, and probably more work on Game Playing and agency.

Until the next cycle,
Jenny