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A.2 Glossary of Specialized Terms 327

• Adaptive Inference Control: Algorithms or heuristics for guiding PLN inference, that cause inference to be guided differently based on the context in which the inference is taking place, or based on aspects of the inference that are noted as it proceeds.
• AGI Preschool: A virtual world or robotic scenario roughly similar to the environment within a typical human preschool, intended for AGIs to learn in via interacting with the environment and with other intelligent agents.
• Atom: The basic entity used in OpenCog as an element for building representations. Some Atoms directly represent patterns in the world or mind, others are components of representations. There are two kinds of Atoms: Nodes and Links.
• Atom, Frozen: See Atom, Saved
• Atom, Realized: An Atom that exists in RAM at a certain point in time.
• Atom, Saved: An Atom that has been saved to disk or other similar media, and is not actively being processed.
• Atom, Serialized: An Atom that is serialized for transmission from one software process to another, or for saving to disk, etc.
• Atom2Link: A part of OpenCogPrime
s language generation system, that transforms appropriate Atoms into words connected via link parser link types.
• Atomspace: A collection of Atoms, comprising the central part of the memory of an OpenCog instance.
• Attention: The aspect of an intelligent system’s dynamics focused on guiding which aspects of an OpenCog system’s memory & functionality gets more computational resources at a certain point in time
• Attention Allocation: The cognitive process concerned with managing the parameters and relationships guiding what the system pays attention to, at what points in time. This is a term inclusive of Importance Updating and Hebbian Learning.
• Attentional Currency: Short Term Importance and Long Term Importance values are implemented in terms of two different types of artificial money, STICurrency and LTICurrency. Theoretically these may be converted to one another.
• Attentional Focus: The Atoms in an OpenCog Atomspace whose ShortTermImportance values lie above a critical threshold (the AttentionalFocus Boundary). The Attention Allocation subsystem treats these Atoms differently. Qualitatively, these Atoms constitute the system’s main focus of attention during a certain interval of time, i.e. it’s a moving bubble of attention.
• Attentional Memory: A system’s memory of what it’s useful to pay attention to, in what contexts. In CogPrime this is managed by the attention allocation subsystem.
• Backward Chainer: A piece of software, wrapped in a MindAgent, that carries out backward chaining inference using PLN.
• CIM-Dynamic: Concretely-Implemented Mind Dynamic, a term for a cognitive process that is implemented explicitly in OpenCog (as opposed to allowed to emerge implicitly from other dynamics). Sometimes a CIM-Dynamic will be implemented via a single MindAgent, sometimes via a set of multiple interrelated MindAgents, occasionally by other means.
• Cognition: In an OpenCog context, this is an imprecise term. Sometimes this term means any process closely related to intelligence; but more often it’s used specifically to refer to more abstract reasoning/learning/etc, as distinct from lower-level perception and action.
• Cognitive Architecture: This refers to the logical division of an AI system like OpenCog into interacting parts and processes representing different conceptual aspects of intelligence.

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