pteichman / go.cobe

go.cobe?!

This is a brain-compatible Go port of cobe 2.x: https://github.com/pteichman/cobe

Whaaaat

Oh man I love the platypus & the lynx; the ocelot & the baboon; the three-toed sloth & even the Riemann zeta function�, not to mention green.

Whaaaaaaaaaat

It would be a 'cobe dialogue' and the process of getting it in production. Extermination of armies, gruesome engravings, and insane superpowered dwarf-wizards gone on a welding vacation.

SIGNS POINT TO YES, JERKWAD. How many folks are going to sext you?

Why?

To explore a more performant and flexible base for future work.

The Python and sqlite3 combination in cobe has done its job well but was designed to solve old problems. It moved MegaHAL's language model out of RAM and into reliable storage, minimizing its own memory use to target a virtual machine with 64M of RAM. Now 64M is tiny and I'm comfortable with building a durable in-memory store.

Performance

As designed, cobe works directly from disk. It shoehorns itself into a database schema that duplicates practically all its data in the indexes without gaining any benefit from the extra copy in the table data. And it doesn't behave well at all with simultaneous users.

Cobe has seen five years of production use: the largest brain I work with has a graph with 2.5 million edges between 3.4 million ngrams. That's a reasonable scale for many applications, but could be considerably better. That model is 320 MB on disk. A modern language model from the NLP field would be able to store the same information in 1/10 the space, and that means better scalability and faster performance.

Flexibility

Cobe's search is relatively inflexible: it's a random walk over the language graph to generate candidate replies, followed by a hardcoded scoring pass to rank those candidates and pick the best. It would be great to take advantage of more directed search for generating candidates and more intelligent scoring.

More interesting search options might include knowledge of meter and rhyme for poetry generation or smarter ways to fit external constraints like Twitter's 140 character text limit.

More interesting scoring might mean maximizing humor or double entendre or preferring replies that preserve more semantic context from the input.

All right

So! Here we are looking at the most captivating and least responsible tool available to the software developer: the complete rewrite. My only excuse for this ridiculous display: it's already done.

I've aimed for 100% compatibility with a cobe 2.x database, and the console command and irc bot are production ready.

-PT March 2014