This month’s activity was focused on continuing to squish the Conversation Engine into shape. I fixed an assortment of bugs that were left over from my last Conversation work spree, then expanded the “discussion topics” behavior to cover goals (of the form “I want/plan/intend to”) expressed by the speaker. “The Conversation,” oil by unknown artist,…

Last year I started planning a physics experiment that would require me to measure tiny forces. My plans for that included building a “microbalance” out of a salvaged analog needle movement. I chose several items with needle dials from my dad’s junk collection, and ended up extracting the movement from an old tachometer. It consists of…

In latest news, I’ve been adding more work to the Episodic Memory overhaul that I began last year. The big challenge for this stage was finding ways to examine results and actually test the thing. Since memory accumulation and consolidation is a process that spans weeks, I needed ways to run simulations and observe changes…

I’ve got several projects boiling on the stove, but none are quite ready to showcase yet, so you’re getting an Acuitas double-feature this month. This post is dedicated to what I’ve named the “self-teaching activity.” The general idea is that Acuitas, while idling, will trawl the hard drive of his current host computer for text…

My first objective for the new year was enabling the Text Parser to handle lists or conjunction groups with more than two items. For quite a while now, Acuitas’ parser has been equipped to handle sentences like this: Jack and Jill went up the hill. But a sentence like *this* would hopelessly confuse it: Jack,…

I picked this book up late last year, because the subject matter looked interesting. I would describe it as a “biopunk” novel: the main plot is about the synthesis and piracy of medications, and characters have lots of futuristic body mods. But artificial intelligence is also an important element, which is why I decided to…

As 2025 slips into the history books, I continue my tradition of looking back and considering what I accomplished and how I spent my time. This year I set a goal of spending 1000 hours on my personal hobbies and chores. That’s over 19 hours a week, and more than I’ve logged in any previous…

This final diary for the year covers a mixed bag of integration, debugging, and refactors. It’s not the most exciting fare, but it’s an essential part of any large long-term project. Probably the most interesting work was continued cleanup of conversations. One issue that had been bugging me for a while was that the Text…

I think my most interesting achievement for this month has been getting the “detective story” wrapped up. This is something I’ve been gradually working on in the background for the last few months. I back-burnered story understanding to focus on advancing game-playing and rule learning this year, but I wanted to do a little something…

Creation is another book by Steve Grand, the mastermind behind the popular Creatures series of artificial life simulation video games. Once again, hat tip to Twitter friend Artem (@artydea) for recommending these. This book happens to be about how Grand made Creatures, so unlike Growing up with Lucy, it describes a finished project. I was…