I just checked the chat logs on the server, nice to see people talking to aici, even though I screwed the pooch a bit: there was lots of unexpected behavior that  I had just seen a couple of days before. Apparently, I did the release with an intermediate version of Aici instead of the one I wanted to. Stupid, stupid, stupid. (even worse: I already continued developing on the next release without backing up). So, You’ll have to take a lot of ‘confusion confusion’ or ‘I don’t know’, oh and ‘have’ + counting got broken (sort of) in that version. Stay tuned, I guess.

Ha, I’m on a roll,…  I just started a new hosting account and tried to install the Aici client. And, Jiepy, it works. It’s all still very temporary, the dns names haven’t changed yet, so I’m running on some test/move domain name. The Aici version is also not the very last one. There’s also a link on the main page in the links section.

Interesting to see the delay that the internet + a shared, overused server causes.

I’ve updated the Aici client app. It’s not a big update, the network itself has some bugfixes and I’ve improved the readability of the UI a bit. You can download it from here.

Well, I’ve made up my mind. Time to move to a new hosting provider. And here’s why: AICI Web. Apparently, Godaddy isn’t planning to make .net 4 available on their products other then on their grid (cloud) servers. The major limitation on these things: no concurrent threads writing to the same files. So basically, no neural net database, so no aici.

Godaddy wanted me to move to their grid based solutions. This would not have cost me anything, except that it don’t work for me. I find it hard to believe that they are not planning to offer this type of technology on their accounts. It’s new, so not yet used a lot, but in a few years time, this will no doubt be very different. So why do this? My guess: there’s a manipulator at work here. Someone at Godaddy decided that, to only offer .net 4 on their grid based products, would be an easy way to attract more people to this platform (clouds/grids are great for maximizing revenue on hardware). I can understand that this is one of their goals, however, I don’t like being manipulated and furthermore, it basically disallows me to put up my web version of AICI.

So, we move.

Man, I hate moving. Expect a few pains here and there during the process.

Well, I was getting all exited on this new web based-client version for Aici that I had been working on and was finally ready for release. Unfortunately, I think I choice a platform that was a bit to new. Not that I wanted to, but apparently, .net 4 was the first version that supported a multiplexing Silverlight client (required for receiving events, like output messages, pretty imported). Which is not yet supported by my website host
So I guess we’ll have to wait a bit until they change their mind.

Sometimes, the word needs to be spread for people to hear, so: I have just registered Aici at the chatbot.org site. Here’s the direct link to Aici’s page.

I accidently lost all my images on the first few posts. Apparently they were still stored on the old site, which I had just shut down (domain name forward actually). Oeps… At first there was a bit of a panic, since the post I was looking at was exactly a year old, which could mean my blog was dropping old images. Luckily it isn’t that smart so, quickly disable the forwarding, and voila, images are back.  Better move them to the new site now.

The designer is a strange beast: the project that is opened for editing, is also running in the background as a neural network. This means that you can use the input/output channels just like in a regular (neural network enabled) application, like the AICI client app. Grate for debugging and trying out stuff, but you don’t want to get your test data mixed into the actual network, enter sandboxes:

A sandbox is a complete copy of your project, running in a new, separate designer.

So, after you have opened the Aici project in the designer (installed at {Documents}\NND\Demos\AICI_1, note that you need to select the directory, not the file), you can run your project in a sandbox. Simply click on the button in the toolbar, or select ‘debug/sandbox’ from the menu. This will start a new designer with you sandbox project loaded. Once the sandbox is open, you can use the already declared text-channel to communicate with the network. if not yet opened, switch it on by selecting ‘view/communication channels/Text channel’ from the menu. The Echo words demo has more info on this type of channels (though the view has been updated a bit). here’s the short version: 

The toolbar:
1: Send the input text to the network.
2: a combo for selecting the method to send text to the network.
3: copy the conversation log to the clipboard.
4: save the conversation log to file.
5: clean the conversation log.
6: toggle audio on/off.
The edit area:
1: All the neurons that were sent to the network as input.
2: All the neurons that were sent back from the network as output.
3: The conversation log.
4: The input box

In short, simply type some text in the textbox at the bottom, press enter and watch what happens.

When you are done testing, simply close the sandbox app and you are done (it wont ask to save any changes). If you would want to do some more testing later on with the same data, you can first save it to a different location (otherwise the sandbox data will be deleted when you start a new sandbox).

It’s been a while, a bit longer then planned actually. As usual, there was a little unexpected detour required. This time, it was called the ‘neuron profiler’. Don’t ask, in short: I couldn’t find a bug, which would be traceable with a profiler thingy. The good news: found the bug, the bad: found some new. Anyway, here’s what’s added, updated or fixed (sort of):

The Designer:

• A new neuron profiler, very similar to a memory profiler: it tracks down leaked neurons (which were created but not destroyed). This is a powerful little debug tool indeed.
• the new flow editor is working. This is a lot faster now. Some bugs should also be fixed (maybe some new were added as well).
• Search on all editors and tool windows has been made into an asynchronous process.
• I’ve added a new clean up dialog box (can be found under ‘tools’), called ‘clean orphan flow data’. Which can be used to trace down and remove flow data that should have been deleted, but wasn’t and is now simply causing the parse to fail.
• cleaned up the module import and export a bit, but not yet completely ready.
• The Window manager has been updated.
• The UI has been cleaned up a bit. I’ve tried to make it esthetically a little more appealing, hope you like it.
• Some speed improvements in the core, more to come though.
• I’ve reloaded the thesaurus demo, for 2 reasons: 1, the first demo wasn’t loaded correctly (had forgotten to turn on to include items with multiple words) and secondly, I mixed up the meaning of hyponym and hypernym in the thesaurus view (not in the Wordnet-channel view). A typical mix-up for me, a consequence of flying solo, I guess. Anyway, this project should be very useful for stress testing.

AICI:

• You can now call .net functions from within the network. As a test-case, I’ve implemented the ‘file copy’ function (System.IO.File.Copy). At the moment, Aici requires some code for each known  .net function to extract the arguments from the network’s input data. I plan to change this into something more generic, so that Aici knows that a function requires arguments ‘x’ and ‘y’ without having to lay out custom code for each function.
• There’s a lot less neuron leakage going on. The flow recognition algorithm is almost completely clean (except for 1 remaining issue). The latter part of the process still needs some work.
• I’ve cleaned up a lot of the code, removed bugs all over the place so that it becomes more responsive.
• The flow recognition algorithm has also been updated to remove some more bugs that were causing the parse to fail.
• The flow definition itself has also been updated considerably. In part so that it would be able to parse complex sentences, but mostly to get the speed up (dramatic results can be achieved with a correct filter, early on in the parse).

All in all, I think I’m starting to see some light in the distance, finally. Perhaps it’s almost time to move to beta stage. )

Conversations are slowly starting to make some sense There’s still a nasty threading issue in the flow recognition code (some data neuron that needs to be duplicated but which isn’t yet). So on occasion you need to repeat the statement (like the ‘How many fingers do i have’ question).  Anyway, I think this is a nice example on overloading the functionality of a single word: ‘hello’ in this case. Cool he.