Abstract
The Assothink project relates to artificial intelligence.
It includes both a general theory of associative intelligence and a set of software intended to implement the theory.
The Assothink theory is both descriptive and elaborative. It is descriptive when attempting to describe parts of natural intelligence processes, relying on introspection process. It is elaborative when trying to set up forms of artificial intelligence.
Unlike other approaches (ontologies, dictionaries, thesaurus), the Assothink approach tends to first manipulate concepts free from any kind of language anchoring.
Another specific and original feature of the Assothink project in the dynamic representation of consciousness.
The key hope behind the Assothink theory is emergence. This clearly distinguishes Assothink from reductionist initiatives.
Model layers
The first layer is a concept universe. While most or all AI theories use named concepts, the Assothink model is built on unnamed concepts: this makes it a language-independent model.
The second layer, called passive jelly, adds to the concepts numerous links between them. Links may be qualified (when the link nature may be defined itself as a concept) or fuzzy (when the link is associative, i.e. general and fuzzy,). Associative links have a permeability value, indicating how strongly concepts are linked.
The third layer, called active jelly, includes excitation levels to all conceptual nodes, in order to describe consciousness processes. Excitation levels are scalar values evolving in time (a transposition of the conscience content for natural intelligence). The evolution of excitation levels is determined internally and externally. The internal incidence is guided by the network of links between active (excited) concepts, the permeability playing the central role in this diffusion/resonance process. The external incidence is guided by external signals: specific concepts are excited by any kind of external sources, which are also evolving in time. The global excitation level is conservative : this means that excitation levels are transferred between concept nodes, but never created or destroyed; the sum of all excitation levels in a system is constant. The speed of the active jelly is the critical component for implementations of the model. It determines how fast excitation levels of the concept nodes are updated, propagated and adapted when external signals affect the system.
The fourth level adds language anchors to the concepts present in the universe. Language anchors are not critical for the performance of the system, but they are absolutely mandatory to allow communication between the system and the external world. This is required when excitation signal are introduced. It is also required to understand and actually describe the content of a system, i.e. the currently excited nodes. All human languages are poorly designed, unpractical and very slow to transfer reliable information, but this complex part of the project is required to allow communication between Alex and the real world.
Implementation
The Assothink model may be implemented through hardware or through software (in the next paragraph, such implementation units are called Alex).
The hardware should be a new kind of computer (an associative computer, intended to think instead of to compute). The hardware implementation should possibly include very numerous (~100000) basic processors, one per concept, and should mainly be focused on the propagation of signals between these concept-node-processor basic entities. This engine would possibly be an analogical (instead of digital) device. This approach is rather heavy, and would probably require years of hardware-oriented research, so it is NOT the first targeted implementation of the Assothink model.
The software solution is more realistic and feasible. Its performance might not be as impressive as the performance expected from a dedicated device (nor as the performance of natural brains). But it is a much easier and smaller project, achievable by a set of high level programmers, model expert(s), linguistics expert(s). The language would be either C (for performance) or preferably a O-O language, like java (for maintainability). A networked solution should include the following components, preferably on separated machines: (a) active jelly engines daemons; (b) communication front-end points, to send excitation signals, to watch engine behavior, to organize learning processes; (c) communication daemons, to feed Alex with massive sources; (d) a unique central cross point managing connections. A staff of 3 to 10 good tech profiles should reach interesting software results with 2 or 3 years.
Learning would be the main challenge for an Assothink based entity. The learning process should allow to create concepts and links; to create and tune permeabilities, so that the propagation produces interesting resonance effects. To organize input and output for Alex. Exactly like a human baby (or a young animal), Alex should progressively fill, enrich and tune the content of its jelly, to make it fast, exhaustive, reliable. Practically, Alex should be fed by ontologies (numerous available), language-base system (like wordnet and babelnet), knowledge sets (like google freebase, becoming knowledge graph), encyclopedia (wikipedia, wiktionary, wikidata), and possibly later by human-readable texts (providing Alex receives or builds a semantic analyzer able to decode human sentences into concept articulations).
Applications
The potential application fields are as numerous and various as the field of our natural-intelligence-driven activities. They include:
- creation of a synthetic language (more suited than human languages for effective communication)
- improved translation system (concept-based)
- theoretical design of new hardware device (associative computers)
- non numeric computation (similar to the computation performed by human brains, thus without math operator)
- efficient diagnostic systems (medicine and others)
- software programming performed by associative artificial intelligence (this probably involves the creation of some new computer language)
- support device for natural intelligence (old persons losing memory - mentally handicapped persons)
- intelligent robots
Globally the Assothink project is a typical emergence-oriented project. Most scientific initiative are reductionist, while the most spectacular progress in the world and often in science are actually the result of unpredictable emergence effects. This means that most potential applications of Assothink are typically unpredictable too.
Status
As of January 2017, the Assothink projects includes 3 years of modelling, design and programming. This already includes several trail-and-errors, many redesigns. It may be used a solid base for further and wider developments.
The Assothink wiki abstract (this document): http://gonze.org/wikiMC/index.php/Abstract
The Assothink wiki: http://gonze.org/wikiMC
The Assothink data model interactive diagram: http://gonze.org:8080/GwtApp/?e=DataModel
Other Assothink data interactive diagrams http://gonze.org:8080/GwtApp/?e=Alex
Contact
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