The Novamente AI Engine is a large and complex system. The mathematical design underlying the system is described in a 1200-page in-preparation manuscript, Design for a Digital Mind: The Novamente Artificial General Intelligence System. Access to the current draft of this manuscript is currently restricted to Novamente staff and collaborators. You may view the Table of Contents here.
While the system design is original, it incorporates aspects of many previous AI paradigms such as genetic programming, neural networks, agent systems, and probabilistic reasoning. It also relies on standard computer science ideas from subdisciplines such as distributed processing and functional and logic programming; and mathematical fields such as nonlinear dynamics and combinatory logic.
We envision the development of the system as falling into three phases:
- Implementation and basic testing
- Teaching the system via interaction and simple conversation
- Teaching the system to modify its own learning algorithms
Currently, roughly 18 months after the projects inception we are about 1/3 of the way through Phase 1.
An informal exposition of the basic ideas underlying the Novamente system may be found in the article Novamente: An Artificial General Intelligence in the Making.
A more in-depth overview of the Novamente system may be found in Novamente Questions And Answers, which is an excerpt from the in-preparation Design for a Digital Mind book. Note that this is Chapter 13 out of 49 chapters in the current draft of the book, so it will likely not be fully comprehensible to the reader due to the absence of the first 10 chapters of the book. We post it here anyway because many people have expressed a desire for a little more detail on the Novamente approach, prior to the completion of Design for a Digital Mind.
The Novamente AI Engine has significant conceptual similarities with the Webmind AI Engine, that was created over the period 1997-2001 by the R&D Division of the now-defunct firm Webmind Inc. But Novamente is a fundamentally different type of AI system from Webmind, including a completely different software architecture and a new and more sophisticated mathematical foundation.
Individuals concerned with the more futuristic and speculative aspects of AI may enjoy Dr. Goertzel's online book The Path to Posthumanity, his article on AI Morality, or other writings on Dr. Goertzel's personal website.
