Hi Mark, > This is, by the way, my primary complaint about Novamente -- far too much > energy, mind-space, time, and effort has gone into optimizing and repeatedly > upgrading the custom atom table that should have been built on top of > existing tools instead of being built totally from scratch.
Really, work on the AtomTable has been a small percentage of work on the Novamente Cognition Engine ... and, the code running the AtomTable is now pretty much the same as it was in 2001 (though it was tweaked to make it 64-bit compatible, back in 2004 ... and there has been ongoing bug-removal as well...). We wrote some new wrappers for the AtomTable last year (based on STL containers), but that didn't affect the internals, just the API. It's true that a highly-efficient, highly-customizable graph database could potentially serve the role of the AtomTable, within the NCE or OpenCog. But that observation is really not such a big deal. Potentially, one could just wrap someone else's graph DB behind the 2007 AtomTable API, and this change would be completely transparent to the AI processes using the AtomTable. However, I'm not convinced this would be a good idea. There are a lot of useful specialized indices in the AtomTable, and replicating all this in some other graph DB would wind up being a lot of work ... and we could use that time/effort on other stuff instead.... Using a relational DB rather than a graph DB is not appropriate for the NCE design, however. But we've been over this before... And, this is purely a software implementation issue rather than an AI issue, of course. The NCE and OpenCog designs require **some** graph or hypergraph DB which supports the manual and automated creation of complex customized indices ... and supports refined "cognitive control" over what lives on disk and what lives in RAM, rather than leaving this up to some non-intelligent automated process. Given these requirements, the choice of how to realize them in software is not THAT critical ... and what we have there now works.... -- Ben G ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
