On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 5:24 AM, Linas Vepstas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Do you have attention allocation described anywhere? > > I recently tried to describe it to someone, and did a poor job. > > The page http://opencog.org/wiki/Attention_allocation > > is utterly opaque to the non-initiate: "Currently Attention allocation > is implemented for keeping track of the importance of atoms. The > overall design of OpenCog calls for keeping track of MindAgent > importance as well. MindAgents confer attention to the atoms they use, > and are then rewarded in importance funds when they achieve system > goals." > > What the heck is an atom? what's importance? why would I need > to assign importance to atoms? what's a mindagent? why would > this stuff ever be useful, and where/how would it ever be applied?
Well, because I was writing in the context of OpenCog, I was assuming the reader would be familiar with terms like atoms and MindAgents. But you make a point that it's not the best description. There are few blog posts on Brainwave that describe the mechanics of the system, but I haven't spent much time explaining the reasoning behind it. In part, this is because I am under the impression Ben's promised OpenCog Prime documents will inevitably cover some of that side of things... but still it'd be worth me extending it somewhat. > I attempted to summarize attention allocation as follows, although > my summary is undoubtedly slanted/inaccurate. I said: > > "In reasoning and deduction,. especially when using deduction > where logical connectives (if->then clauses) are weighted by > probabilities, one is faced with a combinatorial explosion of > possible deductive chains to explore. The goal of attention > allocation is to limit and guide these choices, to cut-off directions > that are unpromising, and stay focused on the topic." > > This is perhaps too narrow, and demonstrates my own > misunderstanding ... but I'd like to see a "plain english" > description of this sort, with at least a few plain-english > examples of the technology actually applied. No, that is a pretty good summary. The other thing that attention allocation is of use for is to guide forgetting and the storage of atoms (memory/harddrive/distributed). I'll put something similar up on the wiki page, so it's a little less obtuse. I'll also add the creation of an example to my tasklist. J _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~opencog-dev Post to : opencog-dev@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~opencog-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
