wintermute-devel team mailing list archive

[Jacky Alcine <jackyalcine@xxxxxxxxx>]

Although this message is targeted at the developers, I encourage the 
robopsychologists enrolled to read this message and give any kind of feedback 
they see fit. It's your job, after all :)

It's been ages since I've seen any kind of real, dynamic activity from other 
people on this time than Adrian (gentoolx) and I. For those who don't know, 
we've moved bits of code from Launchpad to GitHub and re-imported back into 
Launchpad so we can still use this team system on Launchpad and use its APT 
system (until, of course, we can form our own) and still utilize the social 
and ever-growing community that's on GitHub. I'm actually considering getting 
this project onto SourceForge, but that'll require a bit of work.

I'm asking the developers who wish to branded the programmers behind a 
monolith of technology (open source tech, at that!) that just so happens to 
shake up the word of artificial intelligence (or at least the F/OSS community). 
I strongly urge you to update (or clone, if you haven't) your local branches 
and build the documentation available. There's a TODO page generated for each 
and every branch. It'd be fantastic if we, the team, not just I, saw like 3, 4 
(heck, maybe 20) revisions based off the attacking and completion of these 
TODOs.

If people are curious about the development path for Wintermute, I'd fix that 
now. Adrian and I are currently working (mostly Adrian, he's online more often 
than me now) on a specification for Wintermute's plug-in architecture. Also, 
there's a specification still in the drafts regarding how data (currently only 
for WntrLing) will be organized. We *need* to figure out how we can:
Devise a means of representing, crafting, editing and transporting 
ontologies and their concepts in Wintermute. With a search on the Web 
about the definition of "ontology", you'd get a varying set of definitions. 
This is the definition that I made and think is the most approriate for 
Wintermute:

"An ontology is a white box of information (as opposed to the black box 
idea or a Pandora's box situation). It's organized in a particular fashion to 
represent knowledge. Knowledge can be a data triple in this particular 
case, where the data are pure concepts. A concept is merely a bit of 
information that only becomes knowledge once it's linked with 
something else via something else. For example, Boy is a concept. Boys 
are human is a data triple with three concepts, two representing data 
and a third representing the relationship between the two (in this case, 
a hypernymy.)"

Begin crafting the GUI and see how the natural language user interface 
(NLUI) can be implemented via GUI or human interaction devices (HIDs). 
All of this could be placed on a Wiki page (someone is open to start it) as 
we did for the possible avatars for Wintermute. The plugin system is now 
in early shaping, but yet the graphical user interface system lives. 
Currently, it's just opening a window made using Qt Designer, but after 
open discussion (or by creating a replicia of the plug-in branch and 
making a different copy) can you then have your work pushed into the 
final revisions. 

Draw up the initial data sect to be inserted into Wintermute. Currently, 
I'm focused on getting the NLP engine as far away as possible from falling 
into a BNF-style grammar or practically becoming a self-made AIML input 
system. What I am noticing is that Wintermute really knows nothing 
about everything. Aside from the fact that I have to teach it grammar (it 
doesn't reply to anything I say, just so you know; merely shows me the 
linkages in sentences at the moment [not LINKGRAMMAR!]), it has no 
way of really knowing the properties of the objects it refers to. This is 
dependenent solely on the ontology, hence why it needs to be up ASAP.
Critiques, responses and opinions are more than welcome; they're 
recommended! Do your part to keep Wintermute steamrolling! We want 
another interview from OMG!Ubuntu, or perhaps appear places. More than that, 
we want to build something that we won't have to wait for. You're on the team, 
do something! (:D)
-- 
Jacky Alcine <http://www.jackyalcine.co.cc>

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