Have you a question about CODIL?

This blog is growing - and new information relating to CODIL and MicroCODIL will be appearing over the coming weeks. In the meantime I will be happy to answer any quesions or receive any comments, as this will allow me to develop the areas of most interest to visitors. For instance if you want to see a specific paper which is not available on line I may be able to post in if asked.

Chris

Communication languages and Intelligence

  I have just posted the follow comment on Babel's Dawn - a blog about the development of Language.

You write

When you think how much computational effort is required to support a machine playing chess or Jeopardy, you realize that it will be some time before even sophisticated ape interactions can be simulated, let alone plausible human conversations. Even so, these small efforts encourage a thought. Language is the keystone that brings cooperation and understanding together.

There is an assumption underlying chess playing programs,  Jeopardy, and your comments about them, that you are certain that the stored program computer architecture form a suitable starting point for understanding the role of language cooperation and understanding.

     Perhaps we should remember the words of the Irish yokel, who, when asked by a stranger the way to Balimoney thought for a moment and responded "If I was going to Balimoney I wouldn't start from here."

    The whole stored program computer philosophy resolves around the concept of a task which can be precisely predefined as a global model, and written as an algorithm. I am sure you will agree that both chess playing systems - and the programs in your ipod depend on the role of "intelligent designers". and both relate to activities which have no relevance to the origins on language on the African plains.

    Forty five years ago I was a naive newcomer to the computer world, having been very much involved in complex manual information processing activities. I was asked to familiarise myself with a vast sales accounting system (say 250,000 customers varying from private households to the U.S. Air Force, and say 5,000 different products aimed at about a dozen different markets). All the time there were new customers, contract changes, and old customers dropped out, which the products and sales promotions were changing to meet the real world market. Any solution needed to be simple enough to be able to process tens ot thousands of transaction a day on late 1960s computers. No knowing any better I used my knowledge of mentally working in non-computerised information systems to come up with a "simple" solution, modelling how I thought the sales staff modelled the problems in their heads.

    The starting point was "language." Sales staff needed to be in active control of the system and they could only control it if they fully understood what the computer was doing for them. What was needed was a contracts language which was simple but flexible enough to cover any reasonable contract - and - most importantly, was symmetrical. The sales staff would use the language to tell the computer what they wanted it to do, and the computer could tell then, IN THE SAME LANGUAGE, what it was doing for them.

    The reaction to my suggestion was - "That's research" - sales staff are not clever enough to tell the computer what they want it to do - they need very clever people such as programmers and systems analysts (the priesthood of computing!) to act as intermediaries.

    Shortly afterwards I became the ideas man on a future planning team of an innovative computer company. Within a few months John Pinkerton and David Caminer (the pioneers of UK comuting who built the Leo computers)  rushed me into research to look at the design of a revolutionary new type of  information processing "white box" system which generalised the contract processing language to handle a very wide range of open-ended problems. The elements of the system were sets and partitions of sets, used recursively, to allow any level of nesting. Processing was by a very simple "decision making routine" which had a small window on the knowledge base (equivalent to human short term memory). The approach takes  incomplete, fuzzy  and missing information in its stride, and for many tasks results were obtained by the decision making routine without anything that looked a bit like a task specific program.

    So why haven't you heard of CODIL, which was the name of the symmetrical information language.. It's a sad story which I describe on my blog, Trapped by the Box, but basically, exceptional claims need exceptional proof, which in turn needs exceptional funding to provide. The problem was that funding is provided by an establishment who knows that the stored program computer must be the only possible way forward (look how much money and careers depend on the technology) and where by now all the population under retirement age will have been taught (brain washed?) at school that writing programs is the way forward.

    At a deeper philosophical level, there is another difficulty. Humans are the most intelligent animals we know, and so there is a danger that we put ourselves at the centre of the "intelligence universe" in the same way that our ancestors put the earth at the centre of the physical universe. As we are "so clever" the mechanism that makes us intelligent must "of course" be very sophisticated and hard to find - and so all simple solutions must be rejected.

    In fact all my research does is to move the focus of"intelligence" from the processing algorithms (which are very simple) to the communication language - with the concept of recursion (which can easily be mapped onto a network model) playing an important part. In as far as one can identify "intelligence" it is in the way that statements in the communication language interact with each other. Of particular interest the Decision Making Unit algorithm is probably simple enough to be looked at in evolutionary terms. The approach also suggests that intelligence as we see it, and distinguish it from other animals, is a result of the development of an effective communication language.

    Having abandoned the research many years ago (following a family suicide and the failure to get research grants) I recently decide to look online to see what had happened in the intervening years. In case anyone is interested I am in the process of setting up a blog, Trapped by the Box, which discusses the research, and includes information on publications and a working demonstration system.

Resurrecting the Software - 2

At the first attempt the BBC Master Computer started up and all the floppy discs examined so far appear to be readable after over 20 years. In addition the MicroCODIL software is working. The above picture shows the equivalent of a "memory dump" of one of the demonstration files in the standard viewing window - which allows the user to look inside the "white box". There is therefore no problem in showing that the CODIL approach to processing information actually works.

The immediate task is to transfer at least some of the files to my PC and test the software under BBC Basic for Windows. The basic "CODIL" routines should be relatively straightforward but the package uses a number of tricks, and assembler code routines, for memory management and input-output, including special arrangements for differences between different BBC Computer models. Some initial tests suggest that while the screen images will be much clearer, and much larger applications, using more facilities, would be available, there is no easy way of converting the 40 character wide by 25 lines high teletext display to make full use of modern displays.

Travelling Boxes and Preserving Nature

In recent years there have been many protests about the plan to build a high speed railway line out of London, cutting through the Chiltern Hills not very far from where I live. Groups such as the Chiltern Countryside Group are protesting at the need to destroy beautiful countryside and important wild life habitats should be destroyed so that people can save a few minutes by travelling in railway carriages on a brand new railway to the Midland.

Clearing a way for travelling boxes

I have been walking rural footpaths near Tring for over 45 years, including the footpath behind the temporary wooden fence on the left of the picture. For most of these years the area between the path and the hedge on the right was a wilderness of hedgerow type trees and shrubs, full of birds nesting in the summer and feeding off the natural larder of berries in the winter. 

Most days I take a rural walk and today  the area has been cleared and the builders were at work - and I have yet to see a word of protest in the local paper.

Are Your Research Records ready for the Future

Having posted the message about my first stages in trying to resurrect a program on 25 year year old software I was reminded of an article that I wrote for the New Scientist in 1990 - at the time the material was being stored away in case it would every be needed again.

Forum: Just for the record - Chris Reynolds reckons we are storing up problems for historians

AT LAST. The formal invitation has arrived. I am to spend a year in Australia working with computer systems to help to keep track of the greenhouse effect. But there is only two months to get ready! I look around my office and shudder at the sight. More than 100 feet of books, magazines and folders meet my eyes - together with four filing cabinets and a six-foot high pile of computer listings. I contemplate the bulging garage, and marvel at the volume of the records I have amassed during 30 years of research, mostly in a university environment.

I clearly cannot take it all with me - but I really ought to get it into some kind of order before I leave. But where shall I start? My files of studies of local history should be relatively simple to sort out, so they could be a good place to begin. Within minutes I find I have been distracted into reading the notes I made nearly 15 years ago from great great-uncle Robert's archives, fortuitously saved from destruction by being deposited in a county records office. His account of his grandfather's involvement in the bribery scandal of the 1802 Aylesbury election is great fun.

Suddenly I regain my sanity. I cannot read everything as I go. At this rate it will take me at least five years to tidy up . . . I hurriedly stop reading and resume the task in hand, this time on the materials relating to my computer research.

A length of paper tape beckons and I try to work out what it was once used for. It could be the program I wrote in 1971 to run on that horribly primitive timesharing service whose name I have forgotten. Or perhaps it came from that unsuccessful attempt to use the Modular 1 computer in 1976?

Read the full article

Resurrecting the Software - 1

BBC Master Mircocomputer

The easiest way to demonstrate the CODIL approach is to have a working system, and I have just started work on trying to resurrect the MicroCODIL software, that was described over 20 years ago in the reviews,

The first stage has been to set up a working BBC System and I have found my old BBC Master Computer, together with disc drive, monitor and cables. On switching on it has a problem which could be due to the inbuilt battery. This is about 25 years old - and has not been recharged for 20 years or so - and I have purchased a replacement. The keys are sticky - perhaps due to dust - and the whole will be given a good clean when I replace the battery. More seriously I have not yet found the ROM Cartridge which includes the disc operation system.. Hopefully this will turn up and I am planning to have working hardware by the end of May at the latest.

How difficult stage 2 will be depends on whether any of the floppy discs are still readable. If so I should be able to start running the software again as soon as the hardware is ready. If the magnetic image has faded it may be necessary to employ a specialist recovery service to recover as many files as possible from the discs, and if the worst comes to the worst I will have to reconstruct the discs from what may prove to be incomplete listings involving (with the many demonstrations) over 100 files.

Once MicroCODIL is working again on a BBC Master the files will be transferred so that the package can be run under Windows, using BBC Basic for Windows. An assessment still needs to be made as to the amount of work involved. The main routines should be straightforward (apart from a small section written in assembly code)  but the sections involving interaction with the operating environment will not be trivial. Work has already started scanning in the MicroCODIL manual which will help in assessing what needs to be done.

If things go well I may well have MicroCODIL fully operational on the BBC computer by the end of May - and will report on progress.

The Problem with Words

Part of what I am trying to do at the moment is to re-assess the work I did on CODIL over 20 years ago in the light of recent advances in the fields of artificial intelligence and the studies in how the brain works, etc. It is clear that one of the big difficulties will be the different ways that words like "intelligence" and "conciousness" are interpreted by different researchers approaching the area from different directions.

Smoking Boxes

The latest edition of New Scientist (30th April) has an opinion piece - Time to Pack It In on the latest moves in Australia to discourage smoking. The proposal is that all cigarettes should be sold in plain boxes with a prominent health warning and the brand name in a smaller standard font - with no logo or distinctive colours whatsoever.

It takes me back to my childhood in the 1940s and 50s. My father owned a tobacconist's shop and as a child I loved helping behind the counter. I took it for granted that as my father had a cough, and virtually all the older regular customers had a cough, it was a fact of life that all old men cough.  I even had what was then diagnosed as "childhood bronchitis" which I still have (re-diagnosed as asthma) and now know could be the result of secondary smoking.

I was never tempted to smoke - and interestingly went to an unconventional boarding school (Dartington Hall) where the pupils made the rules and smoking was allowed - so virtually no one did. There is no fun in having a furtive drag behind the cycle sheds if you are allowed to smoke in class! I can remember only two smoking incidents in four years. On one occasion two girls came into the common room smoking and everyone laughed.

The other time involved the French teacher, who smoked Gaulois (a very pungent tobacco) in class. The pupils asked him to stop - and when he pointed out he was free to do so, a "smoke in" was arranged where everyone came with something to burn, some real cigarettes and some brown string wrapped in paper to look like cigarettes. The stench was dreadful and the teacher never smoked in class again.

A few years later, when the link between smoking and ill-health was clearly established I did a calculation and came to the very approximate answer that, in terms of years lost through smoking, the equivalent of at least one customer a year was ending up in a box to pay my boarding school fees. Since then I have seen several smoking relatives die slow and uncomfortable deaths with emphysema.

Three cheers to the Australians - other countries should follow in the way - and perhaps all shops that sell tobacco should be required to display a sign saying how many deaths per year are caused by their sales.