Hi Derek,
Thank you for the thoughtful response . . . .
There are a number of things that I'm very interested in within the OpenCog
umbrella (starting with a lot of the hypergraph stuff and the optimized indexes
that Ben has always been talking about but unwilling/unable to share) even
though the core design itself isn't where I want to spend my research time. I
*was* thinking that I'd like to give back in proportion to what I gain (which
is my normal habit in the DotNetNuke and OpenACS communities) but it seems like
that isn't going to be possible code-wise so I'll probably offer to help with
the documentation instead (since design help clearly isn't welcome either --
and the documentation doesn't exist to support it anyways ;-).
Given the reception here, I'll probably go off and do my own thing in .NET.
I'm more interested in doing a lot more natural language stuff anyways -- and
Novamente seems to have taken an expedient wrong turn on some of that work.
I'll be real interested to see if OpenCog can develop the necessary
management structure and coordination to get anywhere. Personally, I think
that a someone or two is needed to step up and be a true system architect to go
with Ben's visionary and to get some useful documentation out. Hacking at
little pieces of the problem and then expecting the system to miraculously
self-assemble itself is exactly what Loosemore is always screaming about and
I'm afraid that the way this effort is being run will validate his concerns.
I wonder if we should start a pool on the documentation arrival date . . .
. :-)
----- Original Message -----
From: Derek Zahn
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 10:35 AM
Subject: **SPAM** RE: [agi] More Info Please
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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