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Free Life Planning Coach Software Update

  1. History

This is a follow up to the FreeLifePlanningCoachSoftware post from ~2012. A followup to this is available here: FreeLifePlanner

This is an update on the Free Life Planner, probably overdue. After working on it a while, circumstances dictated that I redirect focus onto the FLP almost exclusively for a long time. Fortunately by the time this need set in I had learned enough about how it should be developed to make great progress on the project. The most important part was realizing that I needed to use Prolog. I don't remember when or how that came about. It may have began when I realized that I needed to temporarily cut a corner in order to make practical progress, and this corner was that I chose to use the Cyc representation instead of FreeKBS2. That allowed me to begin working more closely with dmiles on his PrologMUD system. However it happened he was able to demonstrate the path forward to me. I suppose I had just gained enough experience to be able to understand some of the more accessible bits of what he has always maintained. (As a minor aside - I am still a bit confused on one point, which is employing Forward Chaining. At one point I tried to solve a particular problem and realized that that Prolog, or at least as I understood it then, simply could not reason in the direction I needed. I no longer remember what system that was).

Another major point of confusion was the concept of Prolog as roughly first-order. Turns out that this conception is somewhat wrong, as one can represent higher order languages within it if I'm not mistaken. I don't really understand it.

But the most important practical consideration was that Prolog was capable of performing seemingly millions of queries per second, being both highly optimized in addition to obtaining an immense reduction in computational complexity by making the closed world assumption, whereas my theorem provers could only do about one query every 2 seconds at best. (Hammering in again the catholic life-lesson from the Latin saying: genus nunquam perit (a generic thing does not perish).) Combined with the speed of loading logic and data, and this became immensely important. Furthermore, I was having trouble doing nested formula in CLIPS, which Prolog handles with ease.

As I learned more about Prolog I was able to solve certain problems in a minimum of code that I had thought it was unable to solve. Also, the closed world assumption is largely unimportant at this stage of the project, I'm not even sure that what I believe to be its limitation really effectively is one at all.

I began integrating FRDCSA (Perl) with Prolog, through the useful Language::Prolog::Yaswi interface, and so developed the Formalog system. By wrapping UniLang through the Perl function call of Yaswi, I was able to implement persistence for Formalog through FreeKBS2 interlingua.

Also about this time, the excellent on-the-job training and experience I had received while working at Ionzero, Inc. had brought me vastly further ahead in terms of web-development and prepared me well enough to be able to do some beginner-grade development using the Perl Catalyst MVC framework, and using the ShinyCMS CMS to get things bootstrapped, was able to integrate Formalog to develop the FRDCSA CMS (FCMS) system, which loads certain logic/data files to become the Free Life Planner (FLP), the web-based system.

Around the same time, a serious of brutal events happened to me and my family, and I was put in a position of doing more caregiving. It was therefore fortunate that the FLP was in a minimally adequately usable state at the time. I extended greatly the Akahige system, which is a medical system. The demands of caregiving were great, and around that time I saw a promotion for the Amazon Echo Dot which used the Alexa Voice Services speech recognition. I saw that they had exposed an API for developers to add an external system to it. This was the obvious route to go in lieu of an open source system, however, at last check open source speech recognition was not in a readily usable state. When it becomes more easily achievable I will integrate it as the default option, retaining an Alexa API.

We bought 3 Alexa's and I managed, after not too great an effort, to integrate the FLP as an in-development Alexa skill. First step was to get a skill working. Second to get it talk to my server. Third was to get it to recognize free text. Fourth was to begin writing the dialog interface. Fifth was to integrate push notifications.

Now the system is quite usable. Unfortunately, owing to its Incremental development, it relies a lot on hard-coded or copy and pasted text, as opposed to abstractions. Haven't had time or resources to promote to cleaning things up.

As far as the reasoning technology, I was able to write a basic substratum similar to CYC and PrologCyc, sometimes copying commands, or by generous contributions from dmiles, who has really guided the project towards maturity.

https://github.com/TeamSPoon/prologmud

Using Emacs to control the Rube-Goldberg-like startup scripts works well enough for now. It is also quick to develop for, especially after the `make` predicate was pointed out, which refreshed the program in place from source, enabling improvements without the 1 minute and increasing reboot process.

  1. Function

The system keeps a fact base of what it believes to be true of the real world or the platonic world. It distinguishes certain things from a forensic point of view, such as the difference between an attestation and a fact, or for instance that certain facts hold at a certain time but may not later. In the future it will (paranoidly) try to generate large sets of alternative explanations that could be confused with recorded circumstances, and generate plans that are tolerant of those possibilities.

In general, the state of reasoning implementations for different subproblems is very good in Prolog. For instance, mprolog implements various kinds of epistemic reasoning. By patching these orthoganol predicates together it becomes possible to implement a similar AI to Cyc in less time than would have been thought. Cyc can be used as inspiration to see how they chose to model certain things. It seems from a practical and incomplete perspective that a very adequate personal life planning system can be constructed with only several kilobytes of theory (not including the user data, simply the definitions of the predicates).

Now, having the system actively working to synchronize its theoretical world model with the real world, it becomes possible to do planning on top of the world model, in order to satisfy certain life-desiderata. Furthermore, with Prolog one can digress during search much deeper by calling other predicates.

There are two main approaches to planning. One is compilation of the project of the World KB and life semantics into PDDL. This is difficult, and it can be expected that a reasonable translation of the current system is going to be complex enough to saturate current PDDL planning algorithms. So the PDDL export is necessarily curtailed to be reasonable. An additional optimization is to forgo having a more optimal plan which would be created by loading the entire relevant world state at once, as this exceeds the compile-time limitations on the number of certain kinds of resources like types and objects in the currently used planning algorithm. (I have attempted to decompile it and change those limitations and recompile. Unfortunately, many of the decompilers I have tried aren't really built with recompilation in mind. So that has stalled a bit.) In lieu of that, we are trying to split the domain into largely unrelated components that can be planned independently, and then asserted as subsequent constraints on further planning. And so divide and conquer. Sort of like packing a car trunk, you put in the big items, and then work out the details for the increasingly smaller ones.

But PDDL, while being useful, lacks a few nice features. For one, it doesn't really do conditional planning or planning with sensing. For that purpose, I have integrated FLUX, which does have such a capability. The problem with FLUX is I don't have any planning algorithm for it is that can efficiently solve problems of the size that are being given to it, with the possible exception of some conditional planners from NMSU, but these use a foreign representation language that I have yet to write a translator for. Attempts to petition authors to release more compatible algorithms have not received a response for the most part.

But there was another problem, that I am hoping has been overcome, that the PDDL and FLUX planners are unable to use nested terms except for a few specific exceptions, and so are unsuitable to plan directly with the Prolog LogicBase. The solution there was to use a mapping I probably read about somewhere that is able to map nested terms into function free terms.

So for instance the term:

a(b(c,d),e,f(g,h,i(j,k,l(m,n))))

Would become mapped to this:

a(v1_1,v1_2,v1_5,v1_6), b(v1_2,v1_3,v1_4), c(v1_3), d(v1_4), e(v1_5), f(v1_6,v1_7,v1_8,v1_9), g(v1_7), h(v1_8), i(v1_9,v1_10,v1_11,v1_12), j(v1_10), k(v1_11), l(v1_12,v1_13,v1_14), m(v1_13), n(v1_14)).

Note that these terms are no longer nested, and yet they are 1-1 mappable to the original. I haven't really been able to or tried to prove that this is an equivalent representation, so I plan just to use it and see plainly if it does fail and then attempt to work around any failure at that point.

FLUX had a further issue in that, due to the constraint programming language it used to do much of its more complex reasoning, it was unable to have arguments that were not integers. so for instance FLUX might have had the following:

occupied(523),

when we really desired to say:

occupied(operatingRoom).

The solution was to use a 1-1 mapping provided by a system called SerPro. Again, there might be some loss of generality here, basically in terms of the how the unification of variables and such in subterms would behave. (Although, in reconsidering this just now, after now having written the mapping to function free terms, applying that before the SerPro mapping might resolve the issue?) But again I will simply discover that empirically. It can for instance nevertheless correctly solve certain subclasses of this full expressiveness issue, which would have made the three days of work worthwhile.

But conditional planning is still not sufficient. There are two other kinds at least which need to be done. The first is adversarial. This is useful for security reasoning, and as the point of the FLP is to promote every security, this is useful.

At first I tried 3t, which looks like a fantastic system. Unfortunately, I did not see enough domains and the domains I saw I could not comprehend the meaning of the outputted plan representation. Judging from the code it is quite expressive, but from a software development point of view I have not found the correct documentation or proof that it is viable for the kinds of problems I have. If anyone would like to upstage me they could explain it to me (especially the plan output at the bottom, the top part provided just for reference):

http://frdcsa.org/~andrewdo/writings/3t-planning-output.txt

Here is the source:

http://svn.traclabs.com/svn/3t

I have started searching for various other adversarial solvers and have come across some.

Probably the most important of these has been the GGP GDL universe, which is a general game playing project. The language is very close to Datalog, a restricted version of Prolog. In fact IIRC Datalog is not Turing-complete, whereas Prolog is. So, the easy translation between FLP components is from GDL to Prolog, the harder one is from Prolog to GDL. Fortunately there were some systems online that have enough documentation to allow us to translate a fruitful subset of Prolog. It is anticipated that for the purposes of achieving vast improvements over current levels of organization the FLP will not need that Turing completeness immediately.

The last issue is multiagent planning. This is where different agents may have different goals, beliefs, privacy requirements, etc. Fortunately, a recent workshop released a great deal of tools and documentation about this, and we have begun integrating it. I do not forsee that as being difficult, now that we have those resources. There is also a great text called "Teamwork for Multi-Agent Systems" that lays out a lot of the epistemic logic behind it and describes one particular algorithmic solution. There are also a few other solutions that have different pros and cons.

So all of these things have contributed to us having a much more capable planning interface working.

The next part of course, is making these plans living plans that work to bring about our desiderata. A desiderata may not simply be an achievement, it could be basically any feature of the environment, past/present/future, agent state, etc, such as that a certain fact never obtains during a time period or while another fact obtains. These logics are generally: LTL, CTL* ATEL* etc. The integration of different techniques (including model checking and answer set programming) for generating plans that provably and/or optimally satisfy these properties are in the works.

The planning systems are very useful for protecting the user. To wit:

http://frdcsa.org/~andrewdo/writings/latin-sayings-regarding-preparedness.txt

An important part is dialog planning, such that for instance the user doesn't turn off her cell phone when the AI is going to issue a reminder.

Right now I have finished a lot of the scheduling related issues. I have integrated and written a lot of helper functions for the SWIPL Julian calendar library. This has enabled the statement of plans, events and recurrent events and such, as well as helping to translate between the scalar time values of the planners and the actual dates and times.

An issue related to scheduling and dialog planning is the part of the system which walks the user through the plans. Fortunately, to borrow an entrepreneurial term, the Minimum Viable Product that does this is finally complete. Though we have just now gotten to the point where this enables massive improvements in the executive functioning in our household, there are a great many useful enhancements / force multipliers that need to be made in the coming months to really drive home the bargain. I will gather the requirements docs together and post these needed features in a follow-up post here when I begin work on them. For example, taking the thousands of plan preferences and constraints that we've recorded and ensuring the plans adhere to them. A useful technique here is deontic logic, and so we are working on that through several open source deontic multi-agent system implementations.

In order to formalize the rules, I have relied on a manual formalization system I wrote called NLU-MF, which expedites the translation of rules of thumb from sources such as books and websites into Prolog. Various texts advocating differents life philosophies have been formalized and are thus at the disposal of the planner and epistemic reasoner, and will again demonstrate their importance for instance in terms of goal selection. The codification of such rules for instance is useful in terms of planning for the best way to promote good emotions and defuse bad ones. I have collected dozens of papers offering putative formalizations of various emotional concepts, expressed in language suitable to agent-based systems. The planner as I've detailed here is expressive enough to make quick work of the more easily inferred aspects. This aspect of the planner will also integrate smoothly and be enhanced by the open source software mentioned in the book Computational Autism.

http://frdcsa.org/~andrewdo/emotions

https://www.amazon.com/Computational-Autism-Human-Computer-Interaction-Galitsky-ebook/dp/B01M21JBU5/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=

It would now be salient to mention the im2markup system (which is installed but presently unclear about how to run as an extractor and not for building an extractor model), which attempts to convert such pdf papers into LaTeX, from which it should be easier to convert using NLU-MF into Prolog.

https://github.com/harvardnlp/im2markup

A related system, that helps us to anticipate and fulfill the needs of others, as well as to anticipate when any of our needs are possibly at risk, is goal recognition. We have a few such systems we have obtained and are still trying to bring them online.

How the system measures the environment is an interesting issue. For instance, things as mundane as checking the temperature have been implemented with $7 USB temperature sensors, as well as integration with weather service and forecasting APIs. This can be useful for the planning process, to know for instance that we should not proceed with a plan because the weather might ruin it, or to bring an umbrella. Effectors are also possible, although I haven't really researched any API to access the few smart devices such as smart plugs we have so far obtained, but that will of course be a priority at some point. We do have tools for remotely executing code on different computers automatically, so for instance, playing certain songs before going to sleep on certain computers, etc. This is hand-coded at present but in the future will be performed by running plans synthesized by Prolog-Agent when that gets reintegrated to the FLP.

Intelligent monitoring of sensors is useful, especially with cell phones. We have localization software configured but having troubles with authentication, that does both outdoor (OwnTracks, using GPS) and indoor (Find, using WiFi) location tracking. If for instance the user proceeds in the direction of the garage, they might receive a warning to remember to put something in their car in case they later drive near the intended recipient, if their plans have not been anounced.

This is all mentioned in the paper:

Temporal Planning and Inferencing for Personal Task Management with SPSE2:

http://frdcsa.org/~andrewdo/writings/Temporal-Planning-and-Inferencing-for-Personal-Task-Management-with-SPSE2.pdf

We have much integration with the cell phone. I think it is possible for instance to integrate the car's OBDII bluetooth sensor with OwnTracks in order to report and log the car, even when travelling. Think autodetection of auto accidents, incapacitation, being stranded, etc.

As far as communications go, we integrated Instant Messaging (ejabberd), Texting and Email (mutt). This is useful for getting the user's attention. Accessing the FLP through the Alexa Voice Interface is also possible using the Reverb.AI Android app (although it has most recently been no longer able to reach the skill for unknown reasons).

Most of the systems, whereever possible, like OwnTracks, Find, ejabberd, etc run on a VM we are distributing it. Using vagrant scripts, it should be possible to build this VM quickly and configure it to your application.

We have futher finally procured a web search API again through WWW::Mechanize::Firefox and Xvfb and our wrappers for such. This now allows us to search for software implementing certain capabilities using radar-web-search. It also has allowed us to wrap different websites, such as banking ones. Also, we have Emacs and limited X11 automation through Prolog-Agent and xdotool respectively.

As much as has been done, for every accomplishment it begs a dozen more features to be added. So the todo list is exploding, not shortening.

  1. Purpose

The main purpose of this system is that, while an argument could be made that almost all of these abilities can through extensive configuration in theory be done by human beings under no time pressure, in practice, the fact remains that it is both immensely easier and more efficient to do them using these tools, enabling people to achive much more than they would if they had been diverted by these problems. For instance, no one walks supreme distances anymore, we drive or fly. No one manually reviews billions of ethernet packets to comply with firewall rules. This argument should be considered ridiculous, but tragically is among the first things many people will offer when presented the FLP. By using these tools one is able to resolve more situations and achieve a better existence, in theory.

The main guiding purpose of the FLP is to help people to provide for needs that they could be for whatever reason having difficulty securing for themselves. The main purpose is to help the homeless, or anyone experiencing a difficult situation. The reason for this is it is easier to get into such a situation than it is to get out. Because the software is free, and can be installed at various places across the world, modified to whatever purpose, accessed remotely using increasingly cheap technologies like used cell phones accessing public wifi hotspots, and so forth, it is hoped that this kind of ubiquitous computing, when applied to survival-oriented problems whose solution have the potential to dramatically improve people's lives, will not only provide for a better quality of life for many people who are at greatest danger and often neglected by current mechanisms, but also to help people whose situations, owing to a current lack of means of prevention, have (avoidably using this technology) worsened to the point where they need a great amount of cure. If they had trouble getting the means for prevention, imagine how much more so for the means for a cure.

Unfortunately, owing to circumstances, the system has been too heavily focused on procuring comforts in a smart home environment, but not tending to the graver needs of others outside the home. The intention is for that to change now that the planning systems have given us the ability to begin extinguishing the raging domestic fires.

There is a truth some feel inconvenient being witnessed everywhere that the capabilities of AI programs such as this are everywhere on the ascendant, with no sign of or theoretical reason for stopping. Therefore, I contend it is wise to apply these tools to real problems affecting sentient beings, even if and especially because there are sometimes few direct financial incentives to do so. I feel bad for those who choose to feel threatened by (for instance, economically) instead of embracing and mastering the emergence of intelligence as a free utility. To use a quote from a movie playing in the background today, "It isn't one way or the other, that's the way a child looks at things and we aren't children any more."

Here are the chief links to the project. Over time I will try to aggregate all important references and references to references etc to the project here.

Here is a page containing a lot of links at the bottom:

http://frdcsa.org/~andrewdo/writings/News-Challenge-edited.html

Several of these systems (currently, free-life-planner, nlu-mf, freekbs2 and prolog-agent) are available below - (Please note however that the FRDCSA necessarily has currently well over 500 internal subprojects (and a great deal more external ones), and that these code bases contain mostly references to associated functionality in all of the other internal and external codebases, and so represents only about 1/100 of the actual data involved in running them. They are however useful for distilling a picture of how it works and what to expect when it is released, and also motivating others by example rather than instructions):

https://github.com/aindilis?tab=repositories

The complete FLP system will be released hopefully in one month.