I’m one of the leaders of OpenCog, and I can tell you that these accusations are spurious and bizzare. Regarding installing dependencies and compiling the code, detailed instructions are provided on our wiki. All the major features have been released (as they were ported/cleaned up during 2008 and 2009).
Some interesting features were previously implemented in Novamente but during rushed commercial contracts, in a hacky way that means it’s easier to re-implement them now. Sometimes people have difficulties compiling the code, but we help them if they show up on IRC (I don’t remember Louie though).
My comment relates to the state of OpenCog when I downloaded it in November 2009. It’s entirely possible that things are much improved since then. I think it was reasonable to assume that things hadn’t changed much though since the code looked mostly empty at that time and I didn’t sense that there was any active development by anyone who wasn’t on the Novamente/OpenCog team an an employee or close team member. There were comments in the code at the time stating that pieces were missing because they hadn’t yet been released from Novamente. Hopefully those are gone now.
Sorry I didn’t join you on IRC. I never noticed you had a channel.
I could have sent an email to the list. But again, it looked like I couldn’t contribute to OpenCog unless I somehow got hired by OpenCog/Novamente or ingratiated myself to the current team and found a way to become part of the inner circle. I was considering if that would be a good idea at the time but figured that emailing the list with “Duuuhhhh… I can’t compile it. WTF?” would only frustrate internal developers, get condescending replies from people who had unreleased code that made their versions work, or get requests for funding to help open source the unreleased code.
Hopefully things have improved in the last 1.5 years. I would love to support OpenCog. The vision you guys have looks great.
Well, we get a lot of the “I can’t compile it” emails and while we are not especially excited to receive these, we usually reply and guide people through the process with minimal condescension.
There has been progressive additions to OpenCog from closed source projects, but they’ve never prevented the core framework from compiling and working in and of itself.
Apologies for my tone too. We occasionally get people trolling or trash-talking us without taking any time to understand the project… sometimes they just outright lie, and that’s frustrating. Of course, we’re not perfect as an OSS project, but we are constantly trying to improve.
Ah, OK. Thanks for clearing that up. Sorry for my perhaps harsh tone, I didn’t imagine your comment would be based on an old/incomplete version of OpenCog, you should have mentioned that in your post or even better update your knowledge before posting! There’s been a lot of work since then.
You can use it to run a virtual pet under Multiverse (although you need either 2 machines or a virtual box, one with Linux and the other one with Windows because OpenCog isn’t completely ported for Windows and Multiverse runs under Windows). It is also used to control the Nao robot in a lab in China. Soon it will be possible to connect it in the Unity3D game engine with a much improved tool kit to code you own bot (because currently the API is really tough to understand and use).
Just for playing around with the various components (except MOSES which is a standalone executable for now) there is a Scheme binding, and there will be soon a Python binding.
It’s really a lot of work and except the HK team who got a grant to focus entirely on it for the next 2 years and some students in the BLISS lab in China we only manage to contribute via loosely related contracts that do not always help advancing OpenCog itself (though we’re trying our best to direct our efforts toward it).
I’m one of the leaders of OpenCog, and I can tell you that these accusations are spurious and bizzare. Regarding installing dependencies and compiling the code, detailed instructions are provided on our wiki. All the major features have been released (as they were ported/cleaned up during 2008 and 2009).
Some interesting features were previously implemented in Novamente but during rushed commercial contracts, in a hacky way that means it’s easier to re-implement them now. Sometimes people have difficulties compiling the code, but we help them if they show up on IRC (I don’t remember Louie though).
My comment relates to the state of OpenCog when I downloaded it in November 2009. It’s entirely possible that things are much improved since then. I think it was reasonable to assume that things hadn’t changed much though since the code looked mostly empty at that time and I didn’t sense that there was any active development by anyone who wasn’t on the Novamente/OpenCog team an an employee or close team member. There were comments in the code at the time stating that pieces were missing because they hadn’t yet been released from Novamente. Hopefully those are gone now.
Sorry I didn’t join you on IRC. I never noticed you had a channel.
I could have sent an email to the list. But again, it looked like I couldn’t contribute to OpenCog unless I somehow got hired by OpenCog/Novamente or ingratiated myself to the current team and found a way to become part of the inner circle. I was considering if that would be a good idea at the time but figured that emailing the list with “Duuuhhhh… I can’t compile it. WTF?” would only frustrate internal developers, get condescending replies from people who had unreleased code that made their versions work, or get requests for funding to help open source the unreleased code.
Hopefully things have improved in the last 1.5 years. I would love to support OpenCog. The vision you guys have looks great.
Well, we get a lot of the “I can’t compile it” emails and while we are not especially excited to receive these, we usually reply and guide people through the process with minimal condescension.
There has been progressive additions to OpenCog from closed source projects, but they’ve never prevented the core framework from compiling and working in and of itself.
Apologies for my tone too. We occasionally get people trolling or trash-talking us without taking any time to understand the project… sometimes they just outright lie, and that’s frustrating. Of course, we’re not perfect as an OSS project, but we are constantly trying to improve.
Ah, OK. Thanks for clearing that up. Sorry for my perhaps harsh tone, I didn’t imagine your comment would be based on an old/incomplete version of OpenCog, you should have mentioned that in your post or even better update your knowledge before posting! There’s been a lot of work since then.
You can use it to run a virtual pet under Multiverse (although you need either 2 machines or a virtual box, one with Linux and the other one with Windows because OpenCog isn’t completely ported for Windows and Multiverse runs under Windows). It is also used to control the Nao robot in a lab in China. Soon it will be possible to connect it in the Unity3D game engine with a much improved tool kit to code you own bot (because currently the API is really tough to understand and use).
Just for playing around with the various components (except MOSES which is a standalone executable for now) there is a Scheme binding, and there will be soon a Python binding.
It’s really a lot of work and except the HK team who got a grant to focus entirely on it for the next 2 years and some students in the BLISS lab in China we only manage to contribute via loosely related contracts that do not always help advancing OpenCog itself (though we’re trying our best to direct our efforts toward it).
So any help is very welcome!
http://wiki.opencog.org/w/Volunteer http://wiki.opencog.org/w/The_Open_Cognition_Project