opencog-dev team mailing list archive

["Ben Goertzel" <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joel,


>
> I was wondering what the reason behind storing the indicator
> (HYPOTHETICAL or CONTEXTUAL) is? Shouldn't one be able to just look at
> the type of the Handle in the VersionHandle and infer this based on
> whether the the Handle is a ContextLink or not? ...


In the VH based design, there are no ContextLinks, nor HypotheticalLinks.

Basically, a VH with a CONTEXTUAL indicator plays the role of a ContextLink;
and a VH with a HYPOTHETICAL indicator plays the role of a HypotheticalLink.

However, ContextLink and HypotheticalLink are still useful as conceptual
entities (e.g. in the OCP documentation).  Possibly we even want to support
these links in the AtomTableWrapper, even though they aren't there in the
current version of the underlying implementation.  This is of course a
totally separate issue from the freshness issue.


>
>
> I guess that, initially, complex version handles won't be necessary
> for PLN since each atom will be in it's own temporary dummy PLN
> context rather than being nested.
>

Complex version handles are not needed to deal with the freshness issue.

They will be needed to deal with contextual and hypothetical inference, of a
sort that will arise very quickly when we start mapping complex English
sentences into nodes and links using RelEx ...

-- Ben