Recently Jared Wigmore, a student of Waikato University, New Zealand, created a tool for visualizing PLN as part of a visualisation project.

BIT visualizer

In my opinion, the BIT visualiser shows great promise as a tool for understanding the complexities of BIT expansion. In particular, the cross joins between sub-trees make it much clearer how sharing of sub-trees is occurring. The size of the BITNodes reflect their fitness evaluation in determining which node of the inference tree will be expand next and will inevitably be useful when we get to the stage of tuning the the fitness heuristic.

Being a prototype, there is plenty of scope for continued development, a couple of the many ideas that immediately come to mind are:

• expansion of BITNodes by clicking on them (this would require OpenCog to provide an XML-RPC interface first however), and
• thematic colouring of rules so that it’s easier to distinguish between the subtrees.

This is part of the bigger challenge of general AtomSpace visualisation. How do we convey knowledge about the processes that are going on in a digital mind to humans in a meaningful way?