Owlyviz visualizes Owyl

[linas]

This is not an issue, but an FYI.

https://github.com/hansonrobotics/owylviz/tree/master

[eykd]

@linas That's pretty cool. I'm impressed that anyone still cares about this otherwise unloved library. Would you be interested in taking over the project? I simply don't have time for it any more.

[linas]

Hi thanks, but no; the visualizer was written four years ago, by someone else; I just thought you should know about it. It is unused; for various technical reasons, we represent all our data in a graph database (it what owyl calls the "blackboard") and our behavior rules are in the graph db as well (because some behavior rules are automatically generated).

You might be tickled to know that briefly (maybe for almost a year) in 2014-2015, Sophia the Robot (yes, that one) was running on Owyl. Some youtube videos from that era, where she moves, looks smiles, but doesn't talk, might be owyl.

[linas]

So I'm looking at this, and looking at eykd/blueprint and a lot of what comes across is that you were trying to do declarative programming in python, (which isn't declarative, nor does it have a declarative subset). So I'm thinking, if any of this is still exciting to you, then do think about re-developing these ideas in, say, for example, https://grakn.ai which is a particularly cleanly-designed graph knowledge-base. Thus, everything -- the behaviors, the black-board, the blueprints, etc. would all be stored in the database (where other algos can, for example, add and remove blueprints, add and remove behaviors, etc.) and all you'd need to do is to figure out how to pull parts of the data (query the data), so as to animate it (e.g. the boids example).

We already do all this with https://github.com/opencog/atomspace but the atomspace remains hard to understand, hard to use, and I'm thinking that perhaps grakn.ai is cleaner and prettier and newer and hasn't yet accumulated the cruft. And we need the competition. Or come join us at opencog! (We need the help!)

[eykd]

Fascinating. I knew some folks were trying to use it in some robotics stuff, but I didn't know it got that far. :) I was just playing around with some ideas for the pyweek.org programming competition, originally. Thanks for letting me know.

I was definitely experimenting w/ declarative programming, trying to push Python as far as it could go, which turns out to be pretty far. Metaclasses and closures are very powerful tools.

My interests have moved on for now. I probably won't be doing anything in this space any time soon, but good luck with your work at opencog.

[linas]

One more for your amusement: https://github.com/hansonrobotics/eva_behavior was the code that controlled the sophia robot.