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The Assothink approach involves three complementary levels.

• A general theory of associative intelligence
• The Assothink model
• A set of hardware and software architectures implementing the model

The three levels are readable as separated parts (sets of articles) in this wiki.

Assothink is a project of Philippe Gonze.

Abstract

The Assothink project relates to atrificial intelligence.

It includes both a general theory of associative intelligence and a set of software intended ti implement the theory.

The model is layered.

The first layer is a concept universe. While most or all AI theories use named concepts, the Assothink model is built on unnamed concepts: this makes it langage-idependant.

The second layer, called passive jelly, adds to the concepts links between them. Links may be qualified (when the link nature may be defined itself as a concept)  or fuzzy (when the link is associative, i.e. general and fuzzy,). Associative links have a permeability value, indicating how strongly concepts are linked.

The third layer, called active jelly, includes excitation levels to all conceptual nodes. Excitation levels are scalar values evolving in time (a transposition of the conscience content for natural intlligence). The evolution of excitation levels is determined internally and externally. The internal incidence is guided by the network of links between active (excited) concepts, the permeability playing the central role in this diffusion/resonance process. The external incidence is guided by concepts excited by any kind of external source, which is also evolving in time. The global excitation level is conservative : this means that excitation levels are transferred between concept nodes, but never created or destroyed; the sum of all excitations in a system is constant.

 

 

The assothink theory: overview

The Assothink theory is both descriptive and elaborative. It is descriptive when attempting to describe parts of natural intelligence processes. It is elaborative when trying to set up forms of artificial intelligence.

Unlike other approaches (ontologies, dictionaries, thesaurus), the Assothink approach tends to manipulate concepts free from any kind of language anchoring.  At the basic level, concepts are intrinsically unnamable objects.

The key hope in the assothink theory is emergence. This clearly distinguishes Assothink from reductionnist initiatives (see "reductionnism vs emergence"),.

A more detailed description of the theory is developped in the theory pages.

More recent document describe the theory using various simple but instructive diagrams:

• Assothink overview
• Assothink data model

The assothink model

A detailed description of the model is developped in the model pages.

Assothink architecture

The standard computers are poorly adapted to the need on an associative parallel software, like Assothink.

So several architectures are considered, more or less realistic, more or less expensive.

The currently worked architecture (2012, 2013, 2014) is the A3 architecture.

Assothink online

You can directly access the online web application (basic architecture) on www.assothink.com  (note: currentyl disabled).

Online user guides exist for the Passive Jelly Browser and for the Active Jelly Browser.

Various technical notes related to the software are described in the software pages.

Additional internal notes

The current and planned development are in the Roadmap.

Originally the project name was Alex. Both names refer to the same project, but Assothink is used for the model and for the theory, while Alex would be used to name the emerging object with AI capacities.

And here is an overview of the Alex phasing process.

Project sizig and status (as of end of 2016)

The project hibernates since 2014, the main reason being its global size (human resources, staffing, time horizon, financial resources). 

It is now considered that

• a minimal staff would include 3 programmers
• a reasonable and effcient staff would include 3 more profiles (including probably an advanced linguist).
• staffing might give possibly work to 20+ profiles (depending on the assigned goals)
• financial resources for entreprise-based project should then be at least 200 k€ per year during at leat two year
• public money is certainly available for such projects (european ? , national ? , chinese ? ...) but public money requires academic frame or enterprise frame (with mid/long term vision)