This month's work on Acuitas began with completion of the Episodic Memory overhaul. I think the one major element I haven't talked about yet is what I'm calling "archives." Files containing recent memories are subject to consolidation and forgetting every time Acuitas goes through a sleep cycle. I wanted this process to eventually stop and leave surviving memories preserved in a fairly static condition. Think back over your own life. You've probably shed a lot of details about what you were doing twenty years ago, but certain core memories seem to be permanent, perhaps even vivid. If you've retained them this long, you might still remember them just as well ten years down the road.
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| The US National Archives building. |
The archiving process isn't complicated, since for now it re-uses a lot of the other Episodic Memory functions. Once Acuitas has filled up sixteen episodic memory files (which, given the parameters I chose, should take more than a year), the episodic memory will load the contents of all sixteen into a single narrative scratchboard, run one more consolidate-and-forget pass on the whole series, then store the result to a single archive file. The archive area has its own topic/event type search index, and upon creation of a new archive file, that will be updated as well. Once created, archive files are treated as read-only, and content in the archive is allowed to grow without limit. If it ever overflows the hard drive, Acuitas may have to figure out something else to do with his oldest memories, but that should take a very long time. It's just a bunch of text, and the forgetting algorithms should keep each file from being too massive.
I also created and tested some basic memory retrieval functions. With that, I think the overhaul is complete, and I can start looking at how to have Acuitas refer to and use these memories.
Next I fulfilled my plan of going back to trial-and-error learning and introducing some ability to follow the learned rules - choosing actions that satisfy the conditional of "If the player character does X, the player character succeeds" statements. This replaces the "do something similar if your previous action succeeded, and something different if it failed" behavioral heuristic once some tentative rules are available. I put a bunch of time into this and do have a simple rule-following behavior implemented, but it's not working as well as I had hoped yet - there were so many bugs that came out of the woodwork. So far it only considers cause-and-effect pairs for which success is the effect (Acuitas also learns "do this and fail" rules, but can't act on them yet). And despite the number of things I solved it is still buggy, so it will need more polishing. But I at least made a start on it.
Until the next cycle,
Jenny
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