Recent work has been a lot of returning to projects I started this year, in order to actually finish them. I completed the feature additions I’d planned for the first half of the year quite early, and that seemed like a good point to pause and go back to things I ran out of time…

Wait, I thought this got finished? Yes, so this year it was time to build a second, better one. I didn’t change the mechanical design much; it has some minor improvements I had already worked into the 3D models after finishing the last one, but it’s the same in substance. What I really wanted was…

Something a little different for today: as part of the process of obtaining my new job, I was asked to write an essay on why spaceflight is important to me. So I’m reusing it, because why not? This is a major side of me that doesn’t find its way onto the blog very often, thanks…

This month’s development focus took me back to trial-and-error learning. I wanted to build on the work I’d done with the “Allergic Cliffs” puzzle game and improve Acuitas’ ability to discover how the game works. I had several ideas in mind, but ended up having time to finish only one: ability to learn rules that…

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…