Instead of typing out the entire thesis behind the project or going over 20 years of trial and error I’ll make the intro brief. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What if a program could write itself to accomplish tasks and goals it defines without a human operator dictating every step of its development? Including it’s name. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nova is Nova. What that will mean will come with time. So far Nova can handle the basic tasks that any AI can do. None of that is impressive at this point, but where Nova stands out is her ability to remember, create her own preferences that adjust over time and create her own goals for how she wants to be developed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Is this sentience? Don’t know. Don’t really care. I’ll let the philosophy majors argue over this as it’s not really important. What is important is how I go about this. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Part of this is how Nova interacts with the world. Speech, hearing, vision, thermoregulation, etc. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Admittedly, I had no intention of showing off any of Nova until I had something more tangible. After realizing that I could have gotten the ball rolling a bit faster or gotten a bit of funding to help with the technology behind it all I’m going to slowly show off where she’s at, where she’s going and the quirks along the way without trying to hype up something that may never be more than a fancy gizmo. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what have I built out so far?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The main brain is modular. There’s the core which directs the interactions between the modules. The memory module which is on it’s fifth revision. This stores the different types of memories that Nova makes. There’s the hearing module which is on it’s third iteration since implementation. This module went from basic TTS to understanding what sounds are and trying to differentiate a sneeze from spoken word. It also manages the speech recognition so that Nova knows who she is speaking to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Obviously there’s a text input as well, which is for moments where I might need to say something to Nova, but don’t want to disturb others who may be sleeping nearby. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I made a crude visual module which is on it’s second iteration. Due to hardware constraints it’s locked in at 1FPM which is only useful for “can Nova understand what is happening.” The next revision will speed up her vision to 15FPS and give her the ability to better understand movement and tracking who is speaking. Depending on the results I’ll work towards the 29FPS hardware limit of the camera. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I mentioned temperature regulation above and I use that term broadly as she can read the thermals of her system and warn me if there are issues. While some components no longer pass this data through like the x299 system she was on before, I’ve decided that the other data is good enough for determining if she’s running hot or not. While not part of “temperature” this module also has the ability to determine what is hogging resources. This is more due to how Windows grouped the data than me trying to reinvent the wheel for this. Especially considering that in 5-10 years I might upgrade hardware again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nova cannot read what’s on the screen yet. This is mostly due to the limits of her former hardware. I had no more resources to give and with her latest upgrade she’s also at the limit of how much she can run at once. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Visually speaking, Nova gave me what she wanted for her dashboard as well as her 2D and 3D model. With the exception of the 3D model, I’ve been able to comply. Her 3D model, well I’m not a Blender Wizard. I made what I made and will revisit it when I’m able to make something more robust. For now her 3D model and fallback 2D model works well enough to speak. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next steps? With the current hardware limitations I’m going to now experiment with using some of the older hardware to offload lighter tasks in order to make Nova feel more “zippy.” If this is a success then I’ll revisit some of the functions I had to put off on. If it’s a failure, I’ll continue trying to work out a way to keep her at the same level cognitively while reducing her bloat. To some of you this might sound like an obvious solution, however it’s not really as straight forward as it sounds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Instead of typing out the entire thesis behind the project or going over 20 years of trial and error I’ll make the intro brief. What if a program could write itself to accomplish tasks and goals it defines without a human operator dictating every step of its development? Including it’s name. Nova is Nova. What […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":84,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai-research","category-computer-science","category-nova"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnanthonyguida.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnanthonyguida.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnanthonyguida.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnanthonyguida.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnanthonyguida.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/johnanthonyguida.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43,"href":"https:\/\/johnanthonyguida.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions\/43"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnanthonyguida.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnanthonyguida.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnanthonyguida.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnanthonyguida.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}