Mark Waser: > Does anybody have any interest in and/or willingness to program in a > > different environment? I haven't decided to what extent I'll participate in OpenCog myself yet. For me, it depends more on whether the capabilities of the system seem worth exploring, which in turn depends as much on the underlying philosophy as the codebase. I'm thinking of OpenCog right now as a concrete way to understand the ideas of Ben&company. Frankly I find OpenCog a rather odd open source project given its open-ended nature -- no target end users, no clear applications, no (apparent) dedicated driving personality declaring "here is exactly what we need to accomplish, who's with me?". I don't mean that Ben isn't dedicated, but I don't envision him herding this particularly ornery flock and browbeating people into actually finishing and debugging code. Still, it's a very cool effort wherever it leads. The language used doesn't particularly matter to me, so I'm willing to work in a different environment. I don't have a Linux machine at the moment so a requirement to work in Linux is a small but significant barrier to entry for me. Screwing around with operating systems is just about my least favorite thing to do.It's hard for me even to make my own guesses about the best way to go because the overall architecture isn't very clear to me yet. I guess that the central data structure -- the AtomTable, contains a persistent cached bunch "nodes" and "links" that come in various types and have numbers attached to them. But it's not clear to me whether the types are supposed to be part of the cognitive theory or not -- are OpenCog developers supposed to invent new node types or just work with those provided? If they can be created, does that mean changing the AtomTable implementation? Is the meaning of the numbers on links predetermined or can they be overloaded? If they can be overloaded, how do the Mind Agents cope with the ensuing chaos? If they can't be overloaded, how can the system be extended to include new ideas? If for example the AtomTable is sufficiently compartmentalized so that it won't need changing, it would seem that porting it to another language would be a lower priority than providing an environment where developing Mind Agents (which I am assuming is the really interesting stuff) could occur in whatever language individual developers feel most productive in. Or maybe the amount of work required to do even this is larger than the actual interest in using the code warrants. The more interesting issues to me are things like how the Atoms (and any other representational structures I don't know about yet) get their semantics and how adding new code changes those semantics... what is the representational flexibility and power of the knowledge representation scheme when applied to some non-toy cases... I'm sure the documentation will make things a lot clearer.
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