Computer Aided Understanding

Although a simple search can provide a small amount of help to find and understand information, they fall short because they do not consider context and therefore cannot understand. Some programs which do consider context have been written and they have proved to be a much greater help in providing understanding. The goal of this project is to teach a Java/Scala program to consider all of the context. This end result will enable the program to understand and impart the meat of a document to humans. Previous versions were in languages lacking features available in Scala and therefore need to be redone.

Babies learn quickly the things which are easiest and most important. Computer Assisted Understanding (CAU) must likewise start with what is most obvious. After a few obvious things are understood, other things become easier to understand. Babies who keep on learning rapidly are not afraid to make assumptions concerning things they do not really understand and then go back and correct those false assumptions when they have more evidence. Most adults are unwilling to expose themselves to temporary errors. CAU learns most rapidly by using the style of babies and keeping track of all evidence for and against each assumption. This is not exactly the same as Artificial Intelligence. The best way to get involved is to translate some code in Java or Pascal to Scala. This is a big challenge/opportunity. Scala is the best language to make this task easier than it was in Lisp, SNOBOL, Pascal, Java, or Python.