Crowfeather

In the spring of the year 2000, as I sat in my studio apartment in the great city of San Francisco, with The Matrix playing on HBO in the background, it suddenly hit me. Artificial intelligence: this is why God put me on this planet. I immediately ran to the local Borders bookstore and bought a book on AI and started writing my plans inside the front and back covers. I put the story in more detail on the first place I thought to house it, at a domain I wasn't using for anything: iJourneyman.com. A few very early little papers of mine are there.

I didn't have that much direction for a little while after that. It was when I had been unemployed for 5 months, in October of 2001, where The Project was to start in any form, really. At first it was to develop an AI for a space war kind of game. Seriously, I though that game AI was the best chance I had of landing a job developing AI. After I got a job in February of 2002 (doing something very different), the project started to mutate.

At that point, it became a quest to develop a system with the properties of both neural networks (Connectionist AI) and Symbolic AI; not a hybrid, which uses both, but a cross fertilized offspring. I was going to breed them and form some (un)holy spawn. I was going to call them Metaron Networks (Meta-neurons, get it?). I also put online my second site on AI, at Premise.org. I grew that site for a couple three years before abandoning it, more or less. It has a few neat little doodads on it; check it out.

For a long time (it seemed to me), the theory I was developing was 10 steps forward, 8 steps back. Every time I thought I figured out something, I would find where it would collapse, and have to go back and revise. Then, finally, I found something that stuck. In April of 2004, I wrote down the abstract formula "information = Δpotential". Information was change in potential. And measurement is a change in information. These stuck. I still go by these today, though in mutated forms.

And one morning, later that year, almost awakening from dream state, I got the flash: meaning is a change in state. This was a functional model of that abstract equation. ...

[more to follow...]