The responsibility of congress

According to the U.S. constitution it is congress' job to make war, not the president's.  This is just another responsibility the republicans are shirking.

Asa H preprocessors

I have used a number of preprocessors with Asa H.  I am currently trying various (data) compressors in this role.

Health risks

Boxing and (american) football are probably too dangerous.  They probably should be banned.

Asa H as cognitive science

"Recent developments in neuroscientific theory have suggested that cognition is inherently memory-based, where memory is fundamentally associative." (Baxter and Browne, Memory as the substrate of cognition, in Proc. of 10th Inter. Conf. on Epigenetic robotics, 2010) Asa H is just such an associative, memory-based system.

Automatic keyword discovery

Some word may occur N1 times in an entire library of documents.  The same word may appear N2 times in some single document.  Words that have the highest values of the ratio N2/N1 for a given document are the best keywords for that document.  (A stoplist may be used as a preprocessor.) Such a scheme might also be useful for routing input to a collection of specialist AIs.(22 Aug. 2014 blog)  Patterns could be counted as well as traditional words.

Sensor upgrades and advanced concept formation

We have taught Asa H some few hundred basic concepts (vocabulary) (see blogs of 14 Feb., 16 Feb., 12 March, 1 April, and 24 May 2013) using the simplest possible sensors (mostly Lego NXT).  We will have to upgrade (see blog of 17 July 2014) in order to learn more complex concepts (like "life", "human", etc.).

Simple cut and paste modular programming

I frequently cut and paste code snippets and modules into new programs I'm writing.  I keep an "excluded variables" list with the code library that these snippets and modules come from.  When new code is added to the library it can not contain variable names or any line numbers that have been used in other library code. (Alternatively, instead of an "excluded variables list," you can search the code library for any variable name or line number that you are wanting to use.) Gluing together modules while writing a new program consists mostly of adding lines of code that equate the (local) variables between modules.