Russell,
Many questions are answered in the Why section on the web site but I will
answer some of your questions here.
It is quite funny that you would be the first to post on my design. You have
posted some of the best ideas IMHO about the scale and implementation of AGI
designs for many years on this site.
Case insensitivity: I developed a dBase like language and database system in
the 1980's that sold over 30,000 copies and it had case insensitivity. I went
on to use this product myself to finish over 1,000 projects big and small. I
have obviously used C, C++ and many other languages that aren't case
insensitive and I think my way is more conducive to a high level language. I
have a number of reasons why I have made these kinds of design decisions on my
website. My goal was to create a language that looks a lot like pseudo code
rather than like most other languages. Names of variables, functions and all
other things are relative in my system so the same names can be used everywhere
without problem. For instance, no reserved words and no punctuation on the
front of variables to show they are variables ($php_variable). No ';' on the
end of lines or superfluous '(' when not needed in expressions. No 21 levels
of precedence in expressions.
IDE in a browser: The main reason is that you would be able to change/design a
system from any browser without any installation or local directories of
source, test data, documentation etc. Everything would be contained in one
place. Backed up in one place. This facilitates multi-programmers working on
the same system, you working directly on many client systems and the ability
for programs inside the system to have as much access to these things as a
programmer has. A full featured CMS is built in so that the IDE can be
enhanced quite easily.
Cases: The system could be used for many things but the main feature is that it
runs all the time and can be changed from the inside or the outside equally. I
believe this capability is essential for building an AGI but also quite useful
for many other kinds of applications. It uses multiple CPUs with no code
changes. It provides for SQL queries but is fully OOPs. This system wasn't
designed for write disk organizing programs or system programs like Google's GO!
Resource Allocation: Memory and disk are looked after automatically. Ports,
sockets etc are encapsulated in built-in Objects and are not directly part of
the language. Security is automatic so that some outside source wouldn't be
able to allocate huge amounts of memory or disk. If a programmer wants to use
all his/her memory or just screw things up, it is their system after all!
There is a multi-layer error system that I have written about on the web site
as well as how you can use a multi-level system to make changes without
stopping or interrupting others use of the system.
The system is not open source but that doesn't mean I wouldn't be open to
providing some or all the source to selected others depending on the
arrangement. I have plans to use this system for commercial use BUT I would be
interested in different proposals that would enhance the path to an AGI. I
didn't make this system to squeeze money out of AGI researchers! I have plans
to publish enough source so that any independent code could coordinate with a
copy of this system as if it was one. This is the message passing and security
that is built in to all copies of my system. Using multiple copies of this
system over a local area network would be a normal small configuration and any
custom C or C++ system could then look like another copy of the system easily.
Search and Inference: I understand both words but I am not sure exactly what
you mean. My system includes indexes, lists, tables etc. One benchmark I
recently did was to create a B+Tree index on a list with 1 million records of
100 byte length where the first 10 characters were random numbers. On one CPU
on my Quad-Core, Windows PC, with no optimized comparer, I created the index in
under 1.5 seconds.
I am sure my answer didn't answer your question so please add more information
and I will respond.
David Clark
-----Original Message-----
From: Russell Wallace [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: October-19-12 10:56 AM
To: AGI
Subject: Re: [agi] New AGI environment?
I think you are fundamentally correct that we need better tools and in
particular those tools need to do a lot of what Lisp does a little of.
So while my feedback on the specifics will be mostly critical, I think you are
trying to do the right thing in the first place, which is the biggest step, and
thanks for sharing your design with us.
From a brief skim of your design:
The website uses buttons and some kind of frames or something to get at the
documentation. This should be replaced with straight HTML pages.
There's a lot of idiosyncrasy, by which I mean, cases where free design
decisions have been made contrary to modern convention. For example, case
insensitivity where the world has - whether rightly or wrongly - settled on
case sensitivity. I'm not saying your choice is worse and I'm not saying your
choice is better, I'm just observing that if you want other people to use your
system, it needs to mostly follow familiar conventions and save the
unfamiliarity for where it's really needed. If it's just for your own use this
consideration doesn't apply of course.
You mention an IDE in a browser. I think the IDE should run on the desktop and
provide an text editor and optional command line compiler interface also.
What use cases do you have in mind? I get the impression the focus is on
building CRM websites, is this correct?
How do you deal with resource management? For example if a code fragment tries
to slurp a petabyte of RAM, is this safely sandboxed?
How do you deal with search and inference control?
Is the system open source?
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AGI
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