pmpj0705

Improving the storage of conceptual flag-panels during input.

In the ghost266.pl Perlmind we need to improve upon a quick-and-dirty bugfix from our last coding session. After a silent inference and the operation of AskUser() calling EnAuxVerb(), the Ghost AI was going into the verb-concept of the inference-triggering input and replacing a correct $tkb value with a zero. Apparently the time-of-verb $tvb value, set in the Enparser() module during the parsing of a verb, was being erroneously carried over from the verb of user-input to the verb 830=DO in the EnAuxVerb() module during the generation of an inference-confirming question by the AskUser() module. Therefore the time-of-verb $tvb-flag needs to be reset to zero not during the generation of a response to user-input but rather at the end of the user-input. However, we find that we may not reset time-of-verb $tvb to zero during AudInput(), apparently because only character-recognition and not yet word-recognition has taken place. The $tvb-setting for a verb must remain valid throughout AudInput() so that the EnParser() module may use the time-of-verb $tvb flag to store a direct object as the $tkb of a verb. Accordingly we reset the $tvb-flag to zero in the Sensorium() module after the call to AudInput(). We stop seeing a $tkb of zero on the verb of an input that triggers automated reasoning with logical InFerence.

pmpj0619

Ghost.pl is a Russian Strong AI that can also think in English.

Today in ghost209.pl we would like to rewrite the AudInput() module, but first we want to find out what causes the AI to switch from thinking in Russian to thinking in English. To our surprise, we find out that apparently during English thought, a Russian memory may become activated enough to rise up and switch the thinking from English into Russian.

It looks as though using "split" to break apart a conceptual engram into associative tags, including $hlc, is enough to change the human language code from Russian to English, or vice versa. Apparently the entry of an English word is not yet changing the $hlc to English, because in AudInput() there is a test for Russian Cyrillic characters but not for English characters. So in AudInput() we devise the following test for non-Russian, English characters:

if ($pho =~ /[a-z]/ || $pho =~ /[A-Z]/) { $hlc="en" }

It works! The code above means that if the incoming phoneme is either a lowercase or uppercase letter of the English alphabet, then we set the human-language-code $hlc to "en" for English. And it works immediately. In the immortal words of the Watergate figure John Dean, who forty years later is back in the news a lot recently, "What an exciting prospect!" Back then Mr. Dean was excited at the prospect of using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to go after the enemies of Richard Nixon. Now maybe he will get excited at what we can do with the ghost.pl Russian AI.

Remember, you read it first here on the Cyborg weblog. We have a chance now to do the following. What? The following of Deep Throat and other shady characters? No; the following of Cyrillic characters and Roman characters. Here is our plan, hatched in utmost glee and Russian (or is it French?) savoir faire. Since most American users of the ghost.pl artificial intelligence do not speak Russian and do not have their computer keyboard set up to type Russian letters into the AI Mind, they would not normally see the ability of the polyglot AI to think in Russian. Like they say on the Internet, "Pix or it did not happen." Well, our plan is to show everybody that the Perlmind can think in that exotic language of poets and world-class novelists: Russian. We will initially set the $hlc to Russian on every release or on alternating releases, so that users start out first seeing the Strong AI Mind thinking on and on in Russian, until somebody enters just one character of English. Most users will then not be able to bring the Russian thinking back, unless they press the ESCape-key to literally "kill" the Perl program and restart it with the Russian language showing. But by restarting the immortal AI Perlmind, said (sad) users lose their bragging rights to having one of the oldest living AI Minds.

The Ghost Perlmind may gradually become known as a Russian AI that just happens to think also in English, if you force it to switch to English by typing in English words instead of Russian. That's fine. It opens up the enormous community of skilled Russian programmers to work on open-source AI. When we were posting today in the Russian subReddit, we gave ourselves Искусственный Интеллектник as our "flair" meaning "AInik" in the tradition of "beatnik" or "refusenik".

pmpj0430

Improving the storage of the number-flag for nouns.

Today in ghost199.pl we will try to make the AI error-free even before we go back to adding in the functionality already present in some of our obsolete AI Minds. For instance, we have not yet coded the negation of verbs into our Perlmind source code. Consequently, if you tell the AI something like "You are not a boy", it fails to attach a negative juxtaposition $jux flag to the verb during comprehension of the input sentence. A few cycles of thought later, the AI may then assert "I AM A BOY" because it has been informed of the negated proposition without the ability to process the negation.

We debug the AI by letting ghost199.pl think on its own without human input. Eventually the Perlmind erroneously says "I AM ROBOTS", which is grammatically incorrect because of the plural noun. We intuit immediately that the AI is retrieving the most recent engram of the concept #571 "ROBOT" without insisting on a singular number. We inspect other recent thoughts of the AI and we see that it thinks "KIDS MAKE ROBOTS" but it stores the word "ROBOTS" as a singular noun. We must look and see if the InStantiate() mind-module has a proper $num flag for storing "ROBOTS" correctly as a plural noun. We see that the OldConcept() module looks up the stored num(ber) of a found engram and tentatively assigns the same value to the $num flag, but there really needs to be an override if a different value is needed.

In the otherwise obsolete but still rather advanced 24jul14A.F version of MindForth, some AudInput code checks for an "S" at the end of an input noun as a reason to assign plural number to the noun. Let us try to implement the same test in the Perl AI. First we test for the presence of an 83=S, but we must also make sure that the "S" is the final character of a noun. First in OldConcept() we comment out the line of code that was transferring the found num(ber) of a noun to be the same number for a new instance of the noun, regardless of the presence or absence of a terminating "S". Then we notice that "ROBOTS" stops being stored as singular, and becomes plural. We create a variable $endpho to hold onto each previous character in AudInput() to test if a word ends in 83=S. Thus we are able to store a plural number if a noun ends in "S".

pmpj0423

Stubbing in MindMeld() and stopping derailment of thought.

We function now as an AI Mind Maintainer debugging the Perlmind free AI source code. In the ghost198.pl AI we first stub in the audacious MindMeld() module to nudge AI practitioners into devising a way for two AI Minds to share their dreams. Then we deal with some problems pointed out on Usenet by persons who have downloaded the Perlmind and evaluated its functionality.

We run ghost198.pl with "dogs are mammals" as input and we press the Escape-key to halt the AI after its first response, "I HELP KIDS". We notice immediately three problems with how the word "DOGS" is stored in the @psy and @ear memory arrays. For some reason, "DOGS" is being assigned new-concept #3002, even though the Tutorial display of diagnostic messages indicates that the AI is preparing to assign new-concept #3001 to the first new concept. We check the MindBoot() sequence to make sure that "DOG" is not already a known concept in the AI; it is not. Now let us inspect the source code to see where the new-concept number $nxt is incremented from 3001 to 3002. We see that the end of MindBoot() clearly assigns the number 3001 as the value of the $nxt variable. Now let us search for the $nxt++ increment. It is happening towards the end of the NewConcept() module. We immediately wonder if $nxt is being incremented before AudMem() stores the concept-number. We insert into AudMem() a diagnostic message to let us know the $nxt value before storage. The first diagnostic message does not tell us enough, so we insert a second diagnostic into the AudMem() module. It also does not help us.

In the AudInput() module we use some diagnostic messages to learn that the "S" in "DOGS" is first being stored with the correct $nxt value of "3001" and then a second time with the incorrect value of "3002". Perhaps we should increment $nxt not in NewConcept() but in AudInput(). We move the $nxt++ increment from NewConcept() into AudInput(), and we stop getting the wrong values of the $nxt variable.

A second problem is that the concept of "DOGS" is being stored with a zero instead of "2" for "plural" in the $num slot of the @psy conceptual flag-panel. The most recent incarnation of the InStantiate() module does not seem to address the $num value sufficiently, so let us inspect recent or older MindForth code. We discover that the obsolete 24jul14A.F version of MindForth uses some complex tricks to assign the num(ber) of a concept being stored, so we will put aside this problem to deal with more serious issues.

The third and presumably more serious problem is that the input word "DOGS" is being stored with the $nxt concept number "3001" only on the "S" phoneme and not on the "G" at the end of the word-stem "DOG". Let us leave that problem also aside for a while, because entering "dogs are mammals" repeatedly is running into more serious problems. FOr instance, all three words of the input are being stored erroneously with the same $rv recall-vector, which can cause the wrong auditory memories to be retrieved. Let us see if the previous ghost197.pl does the same error. Yes, and so does the ghost196.pl AI. However, we should not find it difficult to correct the $rv problem. We fix the problem by resetting $rv to zero at the end of the InStantiate() module. Now the Perlmind no longer goes off the rails of thought, and so we upload it to the Web.

pmpj0412

Ghost Perl Strong AI cycles through Normal; Transcript; Tutorial; Diagnostic Mode

It is time now in ghost197.pl to show a clean human-computer interface (HCI) and to stop displaying masses of diagnostic messages. Accordingly in the AudInput module we change the user-prompt to say "Tab cycles mode; Esc(ape) quits AI born [date-of-birth]". We insert if-clauses to declare which user input mode is in effect: Normal; Transcript; Tutorial; or Diagnostic. Near the start of ghost197.pl we set the $fyi to a default starting value of unity ("1") so that the human user or Mind-maintainer may press the Tab-key to cycle among user input modes. In AudInput() we insert code to increment $fyi by one point with each press of the Tab-key and to cycle back to unity ("1") for Normal Mode if the user in Diagnostic Mode presses Tab again.

In the MainLoop module we change a line of code to test for $fyi being above a value of two ("2") and, if so, to display the contents of the @psy conceptual array and of the @ear auditory memory array. Thus the user in #3 Tutorial Mode or in #4 Diagnostic Mode will see the storage of current input and current output in the memory arrays. We consider the display of conceptual memory data in Tutorial Mode to be an extremely powerful tool for teaching how the artificial general intelligence (AGI) works. After any input, the user may see immediately how the input goes into memory and how the values in the flag-panel of each row of the @psy array represent the associative tags from concept to concept and from engram to engram.

Next we start commenting out or deleting the display of various diagnostic messages. Over time and over multiple releases of the Ghost AI source code, any AI coder may decide which messages to display in both Tutorial and Diagnostic Modes, or in only one of them. Although we comment out a message involving Russian input, we do not delete the diagnostic message because we may need it when we turn back on Russian as an input language. Russian has become much more important in our Ghost Perl AI because we need Russian or German to demonstrate Machine Translation by Artificial Intelligence. When we have commented out most of the diagnostic messages, we need to put back in some code to show what the user is entering.

pmpj0407

Wrong solution to a bug briefly ruins word-recognition.

[2017-04-06] Let us run the ghost192.pl AI without input and try to fix the first thing that goes wrong with it. After a series of sensible outputs, at t=2562 the AI suddenly says "HELP I" without a subject for the verb. As we investigate, we see that EnNounPhrase is trying to activate a subject at t=2427, but the pronoun "I" is stored at t=2426 with an erroneous recall-vector "rv" of t=2427. The error in auditory storage causes the AI at a later moment not to find the auditory engram.

[2017-04-06] We notice that MindForth sets tult in the AudInput module, while the Perlmind is setting $tult in both the InStantiate module and the AudInput module. However, where $tult is set, does not seem to matter. We eventually notice that some MindForth code ported into AudInput() was letting the $rv recall-vector be set erroneously not only for an alphabetic character, but also for a CR-13 carriage-return or a SPACE-32. When we restricted the $rv setting to alphabetic characters, our current bug was fixed, and the AI no longer said "HELP I".

Letting $rv be set only once per word correctly solves a bug.

[2017-04-07] Yesterday in ghost192.pl our attempt at solving a recall-vector $rv bug made the AI unable to recognize reentrant words. Now in ghost193.pl we would like to isolate $rv so that its value can be set only once in each cycle of recognizing a word. When we do so, we obtain the proper $rv value for the first word stored by the AI, but it remains the same value for all subsequent words being stored. We must determine where to reset $rv to zero. We try resetting $rv to zero at the start of the Speech() module, as MindForth does. Immediately we see fresh values of $rv being stored for each reentrant word. We let the AI run on at length, and it no longer says "HELP I" without a subject for the verb. Then we start the AI with an input of "you know me" and somewhat later the AI remembers the self-referential knowledge and it outputs, "I KNOW YOU". Thus we have made a major improvement to the AI functionality by fixing the $rv bug. There remain grammatical issues, probably based on software bugs.

pmpj0405

Perl Strong AI pauses briefly for human input.

[2017-04-02] Today in the ghost190.pl Perl AI we want to solve the problem of getting the AI to pause reliably and wait for human user input. The code for a pause-loop is already in the free AI source code, but the program keeps slipping out of the receptive point-of-view ("POV") status. Some diagnostic messages confirm our sneaky suspicion that maybe program-flow leaves the main AudInput loop without setting the loop-counter back to zero.

Preventing AudInput from causing unwarranted conceptual storage.

[2017-04-05] Coding ghost191.pl AI today, we need to differentiate among Normal; Transcript; Tutorial; and Diagnostic modes for the human-computer interaction (HCI). In the AudRecog module, we insert a test for the $fyi variable to hold a value of, say, "4" to indicate Diagnostic Mode and to display the very most informative diagnostic message during the AudRecog operation. Then the AI coder or mind-tender may either be satisfied with the deeply informative message or may insert additional diagnostic messages in pursuit of bugs.

[2017-04-05] In the ghost191.pl code we are tracking down a bug which causes the unwarranted storage of a redundant row of a conceptual flag-panel in the @psy conceptual array. Apparently, after the storage of the last word in an output, InStantiate() is being called one final, extra time. We remove the bug by inserting into the AudInput module a line of code which zeroes out the $audrec value for any word of zero length just before AudInput calls AudMem. In that way, a final CR-13 carriage-return may transit from the Speech module through the AudInput module without causing the storage or an unwarranted, extra row in the @psy conceptual array.

pmpj0401

Encouraging AI immortality by reminding users how long AI has been alive.

[2017-03-30] As we code the Perlmind running in Strawberry Perl 5, today we insert code to have the AI announce when it was born, so as to encourage AI enthusiasts to see how long they can keep the Ghost Perl AI alive and running.

[2017-03-30] Now we are trying to clean up the ghost187.pl code. In MindForth, the AudInput module handles both normal input from human users and the reentry of output from the speech module. During human input, MindForth AudInput calls the AudListen module. Otherwise, AudInput handles internal reentry.

Improving the storage of words in @ear auditory memory.

[2017-03-31] In ghost188.pl we are trying to fix a problem where the display of the AudInput pause-counter is not showing up when the AI Mind is thinking on its own. First, though, we analyze everything that is happening in the AudMem() module. In one instance, after the AI recalls the idea "You are magic", AudMem at first stores the "Y" in "you" and then writes over it with the storage of a blank character. In fact, AudMem is failing to store the first character in each word of an output idea. When we remove from AudInput() an obsolete duplicate call to AudMem(), the ghost188.pl AI starts storing the complete word of each remembered idea, but the proper $audpsi tags are not being assigned in the @aud auditory memory array.

Restoring the ability of Ghost Perl AI to recognize words.

[2017-04-01] In ghost189.pl we need to ferret out deeply hidden problems, so we have uncommented several diagnostic messages in the AudRecog module. We first learn that the first character of a reentrant word is falsely being declared to have a zero $len for word-length. At the same time, an ASCII CR-13 is being declared inside each AudInput loop.

[2017-04-01] Now we learn that $len is somehow being doubly incremented. We need to find $len++ somewhere and comment it out. We did so in the lower area of AudInput() and then the diagnostic messages no longer showed double lengthening, but still the reentrant words are not being recognized. Apparently AudMem() is not sending a blank space into AudRecog() to announce the end of a word. Apparently it is not the job of AudMem() to generate the blank space, but merely to pass it along into AudRecog(). Perusal of the agi00037.F MindForth code reveals to us that it is the job of the Speech() module to send one last space into AudInput. The generation modules do not attach a SPACE-32 to a word, but rather each word in the @ear auditory memory is followed by a SPACE-32 in storage. The Speech module finds the space character after each word and sends it along into the AudInput module. Somewhere we need to increment $len by one when the post-word SPACE-32 goes from AudMem() into AudRecog().

[2017-04-01] The ghost189.pl AI suddenly started recognizing words when we commented out several unwarranted calls to the AudDamp() module, which must have been interfering in auditory recognitions.

pmpj0329

Improving the Ghost Perl AI Human-Computer Interface

The Ghost Perl AI has recently become able to pause its thinking long enough to accept keyboard input from a human user, and to stop waiting either when the user presses the Enter-key, or when there is no input at all, or when the user fails to enter the carriage-return. Now we need to discontinue the pause more quickly when there is no activity from the keyboard, so we will try creating a $gapcon variable to be incremented with each loop expecting but not receiving an input character, and to be reset to zero when there is indeed an input character. It works.

A minor problem in ghost186.pl is that the MainLoop is displaying the contents of the @psy and @aud memory arrays without a gap-line between input and output. The problem seems to lie with the setting of the time $t value. No, the solution was to set the $krt value in the Sensorium() module after the call to AudInput(), so that the MainLoop can separately display memory data before input and then after input, separated by a blank line.

Next in ghost186.pl we tackle the problem where the input diagnostic display was no longer showing each input character prominently left-justified down the edge of the MS-DOS window. We simply moved some old code from an obsolete area up into the currently operative AudInput code. Doing so not only gave us the left-justified display, but we also saw immediately that the $len value is not being reset to zero after each word of input, which prevents words beyond the very first word from being recognzed. We track down and fix the $len problem.

pmpj0327

Perl Mind Programming Journal

[2017-03-26] The main problem with the ghost184.pl Perlmind is that it does not supply an automatic carriage-return CR-13 if the human user neglects to press the Enter-key. This defect prevents the AI from going back to its own chains of thought when a human user has begun but not completed a message of input.

[2017-03-26] We may be able to fix the problem by supplying a CR-13 carriage-return when the input loop of the AudInput module is making its last loop. We try it, and it seems to work, but we find that ReEntry() does not work after an incomplete human input is supplied with a CR-13 in the AudInput module. We deploy a diagnostic message or two and we learn that the $len variable is not at zero when ReEntry() is called, thus perhaps interfering with the proper function of AudInput. Let us try setting the $len variable to zero at the start of the ReEntry module.

Ghost 185.pl Strong AI enters each input character into memory.

[2017-03-27] In the Strong AI ghost185.pl it is time to change from the re-entry of complete sentences back into the Mind to a more immediate re-entry of each phoneme (character) back into the Mind. In AudInput(), when we start sending each input character directly into AudMem(), nothing gets recognized, perhaps because we need to change the characters to uppercase. We also start incrementing time "t" before AudInput() calls AudMem(), and we start getting auditory recognition of an input word. When we preserve the inner loop of AudInput but we comment out the outer loop for whole words, we start getting a display of the storage of input in memory.

Next we need to implement the switch-over from storing input to generating output. It appears that we are not getting memory-storage of output because time "t" is not being incremented. We also need to turn a nested AudInput() loop into just a one-time sequence. Then in Speech() we set $pho before we call AudInput() for the reentry of Speech() output. Suddenly we begin seeing both the input and the output as stored in conceptual and auditory memory. We tweak ghost185.pl a little and we upload it.

pmpj0325

Ghost183.pl pauses for human input and then continues thinking.

There is a chance that we will attain the Technological Singularity today in our coding of the Ghost Perl Webserver Strong AI, but then we will have to figure out how to blame somebody else for it. Meanwhile we start with a mundane problem. Persons who download Forth and run MindForth see a quivering prompt that invites input from the human user. More importantly, the dynamic, quivering prompt conveys the sense that something is alive and sentient in the AI Forthmind. We need the same user experience in the Ghost Perl AI.

The jittery prompt is achieved in the MindForth AudListen module by having it issue an ASCII SPACE-32 and BACK-SPACE-8 over and over again. When we try to achieve a similar human-computer-interface (HCI) in the Perlmind, it is confusing at first because we seem to be altering multiple lines of the screen simultaneously. Actually we are seeing the AudListen loop re-drawing the screen instantaneously.

Let us shift our attention to the problem of how to insert a default CR carriage-return if there is no human input from AudListen.

From page 354 of the Perl Black Book we have just learned how to use "ord" to deal with ASCII vales as we are so accustomed to do in Forth.

Since we are finding it difficult to detect a "CR" carriage-return in AudListen with ReadKey, we may just let both the AudInput loop and the AudListen loop run their course, with a really long AudInput loop as a way of presenting the human user with an apparent pause in the thinking of the AI.

pmpj0316

2017-03-15: Porting AudRecog and AudMem from Forth into Perl

We start today by taking the 336,435 bytes of ghost176.pl from 2017-03-14 and renaming it as ghost177.pl in a text editor. Then in the Windows XP MS-DOS prompt we run the agi00045.F MindForth program of 166,584 bytes from 2016-09-18 in order to see a Win32Forth window with diagnostic messages and a display of "you see dogs" as input and "I SEE NOTHING" as a default output. From a NeoCities upload directory we put the agi00045.F source code up on the screen in a text editor so that we may use the Forth code to guide us in debugging the Perl Strong AI code.

Although in our previous PMPJ entry from yesterday we recorded our steps in trying to get the Perl AudRecog mind-module to work as flawlessly as the Forth AudRecog, today we will abandon the old Perl AudRecog by changing its name and we will create a new Perl AudRecog from scratch just as we did with the Forth AudRecog in 2016 when we were unable to tweak the old Forth AudRecog into a properly working version. So we stub in a new Perl AudRecog() and we comment out the old version by dint of renaming it "OldAudRecog()". Then we run "perl ghost177.pl" and the AI still runs but it treats every word of both input and output as a new concept, because the new AudRecog is not yet recognizing any English words.

Next we start porting the actual Forth AudRecog into Perl, but we must hit three of our Perl reference books to learn how to translate the Forth code testing ASCII values into Perl. We learn about the Perl "chr" function which lets us test input characters as if they were ASCII values such as CR-13 or SPACE-32.

Now we have faithfully ported the MindForth AudRecog into Perl, but words longer than one character are not being recognized. Let us comment out AudMem() by naming it OldAudMem() and let us start a new AudMem() from scratch as a port from MindForth.

We port the AudMem code from Forth into Perl, but we may not be getting the storage of SPACE or CR carriage-return.

2017-03-16: Uploading Ghost Perl Webserver Strong AI

Now into our third day in search of stable Perlmind code, we take the 344,365 bytes of ghost177.pl from 2017-03-15 and we save a new file as the ghost178.pl AI. We will try to track passage of characters from AudInput to AudMem to AudRec.

Through diagnostic messages in AudRecog, we discovered that a line of code meant to "disallow audrec until last letter of word" was zeroing out $audrec before the transfer from the end of AudRecog to AudMem.

In a departure from MindForth, we are having the Perl AudRecog mind-module fetch only the most recent recognition of a word. In keeping with MindForth, we implement the auditory storing of a $nxt new concept in the AudInput module, where we also increment the value of $nxt instead of in the NewConcept module.

may26mfpj

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 Thurs.26.MAY.2011 -- Conditional Inhibition

In the recent Strong AI diaspora of MindForth and the tutorial AiMind.html program, we have implemented the neural inhibition of concepts immediately after they have been included in a generated thought. Now we would like to make inhibition occur when one or more responses must be made to a query involving nouns or a query involving verbs. The question "What do bears eat?" is a query of the what-do-X-verb variety involving one or more nouns as potentially valid answers as the direct object of the verb. If the noun of each single answer is immediately inhibited, the AI can respond with a different answer to a repeat of the question. Likewise, if we ask the AI, "What do robots do?", the query is of the what-do-X-do variety where potentially multiple verbs may need to be inhibited so as to give one valid answer after another, such as "Robots make tools" and "Robots sweep floors." If we are inhibiting the verbs, we do not want the direct-object nouns to be inhibited. We might need replies with different verbs but the same direct object, such as "Robots make tools" and "Robots use tools."

Inhibition may also play a role in calling the ConJoin module when a query elicits multiple thoughts which are the same sentence except for different nouns or different verbs. The responses, "Bears eat fish" and "Bears eat honey" could become "Bears eat fish and honey" if neural inhibition suppresses the repetition of subject and verb while calling the ConJoin module to insert the conjunction "AND" between the two answer nouns.

2 Thurs.26.MAY.2011 -- Problems With Determining Number

When we try to troubleshoot the Forthmind by entering "bears eat honey", a comedy of errors occurs. The AudRecog module contains a test to detect an "S" at the end of an English word and set the "num(ber)" value to two ("2") for plural. However, that test works only for recognized words, and not for a previously unknown word of new vocabulary. So the word "bears" gets tagged as singular by default, which causes the AI to issue erroneous output with "BEARS EATS HONEY", as if a singular subject is calling for "EATS" as a third person singular verb form.

The process of determining num(ber) ought to be more closely tied with the EnParser module, so that the parsing of a word as a noun should afford the AI a chance to declare plural number if the incoming noun ends with an "S".

Now we have inserted special code into the AudInput module to check for the input of nouns ending in "S", and to set the "num(ber)" variable to a plural value if a terminating "S" is found. For singular nouns like "bus" or "gas" that end in "S", we will have to devise techniques that override the default assumption of "S" meaning plural. We may use the article "A" or the verb "IS" as cues to declare a noun ending in "S" as singular.

Table of Contents

• 1 Thurs.26.MAY.2011 -- Conditional Inhibition

• 2 Thurs.26.MAY.2011 -- Problems With Determining Number