Talk:Novamente Cognition Engine
From AGIRI.org
Here's some old text, dumped here for reference. Hopefully bits can be useful.
The Novamente AGI System is a software system based on the SMEPH conceptual approach, and other specially designed software architectures, knowledge representations and algorithmic ideas. Novamente is designed to be a pure learning machine, with the capability to learn how to perceive, cognize, act and interact based on experience, and ultimately to learn to modify itself beyond its creators' wildest dreams. Novamente's design philosophy stresses cognitive sophistication and conceptual correctness over immediate behavioral and programmatical benefit.
The primary technical goal of the Novamente design is to enable sophisticated dynamical interactions between elementary learning and memory components, thus empowering the emergence of complex higher-level patterns of thought within a relatively simple substrate. Novamente's design is based on sophisticated cognitive models and is near concept-complete. Novamente is not a simulation of the human brain or mind, but takes into account the primary aspects of mental structure and dynamics as understood by modern neuroscience and cognitive science. Novamente design departs from its inspiration in human cognition by taking advantage of the strengths of its digital-computer implementation, in ways that allow it to compensate for the lack of massive parallelism present in the human brain. Unlike most AI systems, the Novamente design unifies procedural and declarative knowledge, and emphasizes a dynamic ontology.
Novamente software implements a virtual machine with an architecture very different from contemporary Von Neumann computers, while at the same time more closely following Von Neumann's original concepts involving self-modification. Novamente's current implementation is approximately 60% complete. Future versions of Novamente will replace present human-coded components (mostly C++) with Novamente bytecodes, which are themselves digital versions of abstract Novamente "schemata" (procedures learned, adapted and reasoned upon by Novamente).
Novamente utilizes a unified knowledge representation based on the probabilistic-hypergraph concept, using a single object primitive, the Atom, which is subclassed into various types of Node and Link objects and used to store and manipulate both procedural and declarative knowledge. Atoms make up a hypergraph substrate called the Atomspace, which is stored in special data structures enabled by a set of optimized indices for efficient access and manipulation. Atoms are manipulated by two core cognitive algorithms: PTL (Probability Term Logic), used for first-order and higher-order inference, and Combo-BOA (Bayesian Optimization Algorithm operating on combinator-tree objects), used for probabilistically-guided (non-random) GA-type evolution for solution finding and optimization. BOA and PTL are interdependent conceptually, and on the code level, and are intercombined within various "cognitive control schema" (which are themselves, in principle, learnable by Novamente) that carry out specialized mental functions like attention allocation, language learning, visual stimulus processing, action planning, etc. At the highest level, Novamente is a 64-bit distributed software system, with a collection of functional units (called Lobes), each containing a local Atomspace and a collection of cognitive control schema oriented toward a particular aspect of mental process such as language processing, perception, abstract cognition, etc.
David Hart 23:31, 16 December 2006 (EST)
