OpenCog Framework

I needed the ability to hand-edit opencog data while other processes were running. And so I hacked with guile for a while, and now there’s a scheme shell for opencog. So far it’s very simple: just say ’scm’ at the opencog prompt; this puts you into the shell. Then you can scheme away. So, fore example:   (cog-new-node 'ConceptNode [...]

I’ve been spending the last week at Ben Goertzel’s place to discuss the work I’ve done on attention allocation and to get up to speed on Probabilistic Logic Networks (PLN). There was also an introduction to Relex and RelexToFrame and how PLN will be of use in normalising the Frame representation of a sentence. The ideas [...]

This post will cover the HebbianLink, and two MindAgents, the ImportanceSpreadingAgent and the HebbianLearningAgent. The former agent spreads Short term importance (STI) along HebbianLinks, while the later updates the HebbianLink truth values. Let’s ... [More] look at the HebbianLink shall we? There are three types: symmetric, asymmetric and inverse. I’ll concentrate on the symmetric HebbianLink here, but there is [...] [Less]

I spent the weekend creating a small, simple shim to import WordNet data into OpenCog. it got me to thinking about software quality. At first, I intended to use the NLTK Python interfaces into the wordnet data … it seemed like a good chance practice coding in Python a bit. I got almost nowhere. The [...]

The ImportanceUpdatingAgent handles the exchange of currency between atoms. Every thought cycle It pays out wages in the form of Short Term Importance (STI) and Long Term Importance (LTI) to atoms that are currently in use, and also collects rent from an atom’s STI and LTI. As atoms are used in mind processes they are endowed [...]

A 7-minute video from the AGI-08 post-conference workshop.

My task for the past couple of months has been to implement code to manage attention allocation within OpenCog. This process of deciding which atoms in the system are important is useful for a number of reasons, such as memory management and the ... [More] forgetting process, and guiding the PLN (Probabilistic Logic Network) inference process. Attention [...] [Less]

I spent the afternoon creating a formalized mapping from RelEx and Wordnet to OpenCog. The goal is to clean things up enough so that I can run word-sense disambiguation code with opencog itself. Now, one thing that was nagging me is that this is, in some sense, the hard-way forward — I could just [...]

Crunch time is here! Our participation in Google’s Summer of Code program has accelerated release schedules and shifted priorities. Ben is busy writing initial documentation, converting much of it from Novamente documentation. Gustavo, Senna and ... [More] Linas are working to tidy OpenCog code, removing crufty and embarrassing bits and improving infrastructure and interfaces. Joel is working [...] [Less]

I’ve been reading up on the iCub open-source humanoid robot lately, and I think it’s pretty exciting. Given what open source has done for Web browsers, bioinformatics tools and other sorts of software, the possibility of harnessing the same ... [More] development methodology for robot hardware and software development seems almost irresistably exciting.I’m no roboticist, but I do know something about the AI software that robots need to understand the world and act in it – and I’ve been doing a lot of work lately on the use of AI to control simulated agents in virtual worlds. In this vein, this blog entry contains some follow-up thoughts about the possibility of building connections between the iCub and various other relevant open-source software systems relevant to AI and virtual worlds.For starters: What if someone made a detailed simulation of iCub in Gazebo, an open-source 3D robot simulation platform? Then folks around the world could experiment with iCub without even building a robot, simply via writing software and experimenting with the simulation. Experiments with other robots and Gazebo have shown that the simulation generally agrees very closely with real-world robotic experience. And what if someone integrated Gazebo with OpenSim, the up-and-coming open-source virtual-world platform (which uses an improved version of Second Life’s user interface, but features a more sophisticatedly architected and flexible back end, and best of all it’s free)? Furthermore, work is underway to integrate OpenSim with OpenCog, an open-source AI platform aimed at advanced machine cognition (yes, I’m one of the organizers of OpenCog); and OpenSim could similarly be integrated with OpenCyc, OpenNARS, and a host of other existing open-source AI platforms. Throngs of diversely customized, simulated iCubs controlled by various AI algorithms could mill around OpenSim, interacting with human-controlled avatars in the simulated world, learning and sharing their knowledge with each other. The behaviors and knowledge learned by the robots in the virtual world could then be transferred immediately back to their physically embodied brethren. What stands between us and this vision is “just” some software integration work ... but of course, this kind of work isn’t easy and takes time and expertise. For various economic and cultural reasons, this sort of work has not been favored by any of the world’s major R&D funding sources – but the open-source approach seems to have increasingly high odds of getting it done. It seems at least plausible that iCub won’t go the way of OpenPINO and other prior attempts at open-source robotics, and will instead combine with other open-source initiatives to form a key part of a broadly-accepted, dynamically evolving platform for exploring physical and virtual humanoid robotics. [Less]