Pete Fenelon <pete at fenelon.com> wrote on Tue, 06 Aug 2002:
>>In alt.folklore.computers Arthur T. Murray <uj797 at victoria.tc.ca> wrote:
>> First of all, we went in and performed a shunt.
>>>> We shut off all circulation to the SVO() module and
>> we routed everything through a new Ruminate() module.
>> Here's a sentence: "Pack in in, crank".
>> pete
> --
>pete at fenelon.com "there's no room for enigmas in built-up areas" HMHB
Am 6. August 1985+17=1945+57=2002, Dienstag Morgen in der Zoka.
Having naught else to do yesterday evening, after minimal Web-
surfing I coded "5aug02A.html" with the initial framework for
"meandering free-thought."
Once again I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is,
mutatis mutandis, to grab one section of JavaScript AI code
and plunk it down somewhere else in the artificial Mind.
I created a "Ruminate()" module and I activated it after
commenting out the standard call to the "SVO()" module.
Next I set up a looping thought-generation sequence that
would run while a variable "muse" remained at a value of
one and not zero. At the bottom of the thought-loop I put
a call to any most recent auditory engram of the word "and"
so that the AI Mind would concatenate its meandering thoughts
with the conjunction "AND".
The first generation of a meandering thought was interminably
long and I almost had to nerve-pinch the application, but
fortunately MSIE itself complained of a slowdown and offered
me the opportunity to stop the AI program.
After that misadventure, I decided to concoct all sorts of
safety-net mechanisms to prevent the AI from lapsing into an
endless NLP-generation loop. The first such anti-loop trap
was a break-out code-line for any output beyond forty characters
in length. Still the sentences were too long, so I reduced the
limit to thirty characters, then twenty-four. It turned out
that the output-limit only kicked in after a clause was
generated, not before, and so a sentence with big words
could easily meander on well past the nominal output-limit.
On the other hand, clauses with really short words could
multiply amply before the length-limit kicked in.
Another early problem was that all the output of any length
was stupidly ending with the non-sequitur conjunction "AND".
I obviated that problem by moving the error-trap slightly upwards
to be above, not below, the call to the conjunction "AND".
Once I had a typical output of about two clauses joined
by the "AND" conjunction, I had done all the work that I
dared or wanted to do in one exploratory session, so I
"packed it in" (as they beseech me on Usenet) and I
uploaded the newly updated JavaScript AI Mind to
http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/jsaimind.html (q.v.).
