FRDCSA

Does anyone share a vision of an intelligent software agent with planning capabilities that is able to navigate around a computer and generate plans to accomplish tasks it derives or are delegated by the users, moving and processing files, reading and understanding their natural language contents, extracting structured information from semi-structured sources, acting in meaningful ways as described by knowledge bases of procedural information, reading man pages, using perceptual capabilities to guide experimentation with existing software components to learn pre and post conditions to heighten capabilities, study documentation, memoize function calls, index functions, index new software, extract lists of their features, package that software and wrap it, analyze both the code itself and the function signatures, derive knowledge bases about their features, use this in automated programming and program synthesis. This is some of the more long-term research I am debating embarking on. I know that such systems already exist, such as are available in ResearchCyc. The challenge is to make an open source version. One of the ways I am proceeding is to iterate, via system iterator, over the projects available from sourceforge that are closest to these capabilities and communicate with their authors about the need to package and integrate these systems into a coherent whole. In particular, I am collecting Prolog and Lisp code, as these are among the highest level systems currently available, and can more easily be integrated, given that they are extensible programmable programming languages.

This long term research is not as important as the short term work on the life planner however, and so, given that unless I am able to generate a foolproof plan for the future I won't always have as close to an ideal environment for working on this as I do now. Also, I am having trouble finding the motivation to work on the longer term stuff because I keep getting waylaid, which is contributing to a learned helplessness against sticking my neck out again on these sorts of projects. However, without these tools, stuff like the packager system and the Free Life planner are going to have practical limits to what they can achieve, just as the packager system has failed to fully automatically package arbitrary software so far.