A somewhat interesting point came up in discussions w/ Misgana re ECAN today...
So far we have been working on two methods of attention allocation: -- spreading importance from everything in the AttentionalFocus, frequently -- spreading importance from everything in the Atomspace, but more slowly (by sampling Atoms from the Atomspace with probability proportional to STI, and then spreading from each Atom as it's sampled) But we have seen a need now for a third method -- iterating through every X in the AttentionalFocus, and spreading importance K links out from X (where, say, K=2 or 3) The practical use-case that made this requirement clear was: rapidly boosting the importance of question-answers, that contain words which are in the AF.... The question-answers are ImplicationLinks, which point to ListLinks, which point to words ... so to get STI to the ImplicationLink, a word in the AF needs to send STI to the ListLink which then needs to send STI to the ImplicationLink... But more generally one can view this as an importance-spreading agent aimed at spreading activity from the AttentionalFocus to the "Fringe" of consciousness -- those things that one can feel at the back of one's mind, on the edge of one's consciousness ... one is aware they are there but not quite aware of what they are, but one can generally with effort pull them into one's awareness... Sometimes spreading enough STI into the Fringe will cause something in the Fringe to get boosted into the AttentionalFocus .... -- Ben -- Ben Goertzel, PhD http://goertzel.org Super-benevolent super-intelligence is the thought the Global Brain is currently struggling to form... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "opencog" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to opencog+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to opencog@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/opencog. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/opencog/CACYTDBdGNipWfnguuZY%2ByyGtnCxAKoXfqoTiYMSsGcqj0rQ5Mw%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
