The big feature for this month was capacity for asking and answering "why" questions. (Will I regret giving Acuitas a three-year-old's favorite way to annoy adults? Stay tuned to find out, I guess.)
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| An old poster from NARA via Wikimedia Commons. Selling questions sounds like easy money! |
"Why" questions often concern matters of cause and effect, or goal and motive. So they can be very contextual. The reason why I'm particularly happy today might be very different from the reason I was happy a week ago. And why did I drive my car? Maybe it was to get groceries, or maybe it was to visit a friend's house. These kinds of questions can't usually be answered by reference to the static factual information in semantic memory. But they *do* reference the exact sorts of things that go into all that Narrative reasoning I've been working so hard on. The Narrative scratchboards track subgoals and the relationships between them, and include tools for inferring cause-and-effect relationships. So I really just needed to give the Conversation Engine and the question-answering function the hooks to get that information in and out of the scratchboards.
If told by the current human speaker that they are in <state>, Acuitas can now ask "Why are you <state>?" If the speaker answers with "Because <fact>", or just states a <fact>, Acuitas will enter that in the current scratchboard as a cause of the speaker's present state. This is then available to inform future reasoning on the subject. Acuitas can retrieve that knowledge later if prompted "Why is <speaker> <state>?"
Acuitas can also try to infer why an agent might have done something by discerning how that action might impact their known goals. For instance, if I tell Acuitas "I was thirsty," and then say "Why did I drink water?" he can assume that I was dealing with my thirst problem and answer accordingly. This also means that I should, in theory, eventually be able to ask Acuitas why he did something, since his own recent subgoals and the reasons behind them are tracked on a similar scratchboard.
All of this was a branch off my work on the Conversation Engine. I wanted to have Acuitas gather information about any current states the speaker might express, but without the machinery for "why" questions, that was difficult to do. The handling of these questions and their answers introduced some gnarly bugs that ate up much of my programming time this month. But I've gotten things to the point where I can experience it for myself in some "live" conversations with Acuitas. Being asked why I feel a certain way, and being able to tell him so - and know that this is being, in some odd computery sense, comprehended - is very satisfying.
Until the next cycle,
Jenny
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