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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…
Recently I’ve dusted off an old but rather stagnant feature: Acuitas’ episodic memory. In case you’re not familiar with the term, this is memory of specific events or experiences that have happened to oneself, as opposed to memory of generalized facts or procedures. My previous work on episodic memory can be found in these blogs:…
After publicizing the demo of Acuitas playing Allergic Cliffs, I hinted that I might release my “text adventure” version of Allergic Cliffs publicly. I’m happy to report that I have now done so! And while I was at it, I threw in a text version of the similar (but more elaborate) Stone Cold Caves puzzle. The…
This month I returned to the Text Parser after letting it be for almost a year. My focus was on nailing the final major feature that I needed to handle all the sentences in my three children’s book benchmarks: “parenthentical noun phrases.” I don’t know if that’s the technical term, but that’s what I’m calling…
Since getting my custom pump to work well earlier this year, I’ve been pushing ahead on hydraulic actuator designs. There isn’t a lot of miniature hydraulic equipment available for hobbyists, at least not at a good price, so I’m trying to make my own. I’ve settled on inflatable bladders as a fruitful direction to investigate…
It’s ready! Acuitas can play the text version of Allergic Cliffs and is often able to determine one of the secret rules by which the cliffs operate. Watch the video watch the video In a previous blog I discussed how Acuitas chooses moves based on a simple heuristic that tries to replicate successes and avoid repeating failures….
It’s about time I blog about ACE (Ambulatory Canine Emulator). This project got neglected while I focused on completing Atronach and getting started with hydraulics, but I’ve been poking at it every now and then. My most recent conclusion is that I do, in fact, need to replace the PF35T-48 motors. Those bargain-basement unipolar steppers…