The MindForth Programming Journal (MFPJ) is both a tool in developing MindForth open-source artificial intelligence (AI) and an archival record of the history of how the AI Forthmind evolved over time.
1 Mon.25.APR.2011 -- Return to General MindForth Coding
We may shift our attention away for a time from the treatment of English articles and concentrate instead on further work in the implementation of neural inhibition.
2 Tues.26.APR.2011 -- Linking Subject with Related Knowledge
One of our techniques for learning what to do next in MindForth artificial intelligence (AI) is to run the program and check to see what is the most glaring problem that we encounter. Currently we notice that the AI fails at first (but only at first) to retrieve its own self-knowledge when we prompt such retrieval by entering "you" or "you are". The AI has been answering "I AM I", which shows a failure to activate "ANDRU" as the name of the AI, or "PERSON" and "ROBOT" as nouns which should come to mind when the robotic person thinks about itself.
MindForth is already a so-called "artilect" of sufficient mental complexity that the AI is not stuck in a rut of answering "I AM I" interminably when called upon to describe itself. The mechanisms of neural inhibition prevent more than a few instances of "I AM I" and enable the mind-in-software to generate "I AM PERSON" and "I AM ROBOT" as responses more to our liking. We need to know, however, why the AI initially makes the error of repeating "I AM I" a few times before inhibiting the unwanted response and before generating the more informative responses.
Our initial troubleshooting indicates that entering "you" as input to the AI properly activates the "I" concept so that the AI can at least utter "I AM I" in faulty response, but obviously the software mindgrid is not letting go of the "I" concept quickly enough to let a noun like "ROBOT" or "PERSON" complete the response. The problem may seem like a simple issue of setting activation-levels for concepts in the AI, but many of the settings are interdependent within the totality of the AI program.
We must keep in mind some special techniques for troubleshooting the AI Mind behavior. We may examine older versions of MindForth to see not only if the problem was absent in the past, but also when and why the problem emerged. We have also the option of running the JavaScript version of the same AI Mind to see if the same problem is present. We also have extreme options like making the AI program halt at any stage in its thinking.
When we test MindForth by inserting a "QUIT" command into the BeVerb module just after the calling of the VerbAct module, we discover that nouns like "ANDRU" and "ROBOT" and "PERSON" are all left with only twenty-three points of activation, while the "I" concept has thirty-nine points. Further testing shows us that the InStantiate module is setting an "act" of forty (40) just after speaking the "I" pronoun. Therefore, even if the concept of "I" is initially psi-damped, the ReEntry process leaves the "I" concept with an activation of forty.
We solve the current problem of failure to link subjects with related knowledge by inserting into the InStantiate module a test to set conceptual activations to zero during the ReEntry of concept-words that have just been thought.
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