Status and Resources

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Last verified: 2026-05-13

Current Status

  • Operational: C++ ECAN agents (attentionrepo); MeTTa ECAN (metta-attentiononSTI,0.5stochastic PeTTa) with elapsed-time importance decay and Hebbian learning. The "stochastic-importance-diffusion" module name is inherited concept naming from the 2009 paper; the active implementation in both C++ and MeTTa is deterministic × (1 − decay_rate)^averageElapsedTime not the literal × (1 + tanh(...)) focus-boundary probability — confirmed by direct code inspection of both repos.
  • Under development: MORK-native importance embedding via Weighted Atom Sweeps; DAS Attention Broker integration; collapse→fold performance refactoring
  • Proposed: Incompressible-fluid-network attention dynamics (In-Fluid-Net); HJB-based optimal control for goal-aware attention routing; continuous-time transport between discrete ECAN steps

Open Problems / Research Directions

  • Scaling ECAN to very large AtomSpaces — balancing diffusion breadth against computational cost (fringe spreading as intermediate solution)
  • Integration of fluid-dynamic attention with MORK's ShardZipper for distributed attention state
  • Tuning the economic parameters (rent, wages, tax rates) adaptively rather than manually — virtual-Hebbian-weight calibration as one proposed methodology
  • Formal analysis of convergence and stability properties under the fluid extension
  • Resolving Hyperpose concurrency for attention diffusion — batch-parallel STI updates with bounded error tolerance
  • IIT Phi as evaluation metric for attention dynamics quality — unexplored since 2017
  • Re-establish executable PLN-attention coupling. The narrow URE STI source-selection hook from 2016–2018 was deliberately unwired in commit 0b744dbab when the URE rewrite did not preserve the AttentionBank dependency. Current MeTTa-PLN has no attention-layer integration; the 2014 Harrigan et al. paper-architectural design has not been productionized as an executable runtime. See ECAN Full → Development and Historical Context for the full timeline.
  • Decide which broader-OpenCog ECAN consumers to revive. Pre-2019 OpenCog had Ghost dialogue (STI-weighted action-selector at matcher.scm:117-130, 284; STI/AF reads/writes in matcher and schema procedures), NLP fuzzy matching (AF-only via bank->atom_is_in_AF), Python web API AttentionValue surfaces, and OpenPsi (action-selector seam plus an uncalled rule-sca-weight STI helper — an enabler rather than a default consumer) — all confirmed at the pre-removal monorepo snapshot during the ECAN cluster pilot. None were preserved as functioning ECAN integrations across the 2019 AttentionBank removal; none have documented MeTTa equivalents. Selecting which consumer integrations to rebuild is an open Hyperon-ecosystem decision.

Primary Sources

  • Economic Attention Networks — Iklé, Pitt, Goertzel, Sellman (2009). AGI-09.
  • Nonlinear Dynamical Attention — Iklé & Goertzel (2011). AGI-11.
  • Guiding PLN with Attention Allocation — Harrigan et al. (2014). AGI-14.
  • Goertzel, B. (2025). Hyperon for AGI⇒ASI Whitepaper, §5.3–5.4, §6.3.
  • Cluster-pilot extraction archive (2026-04-26): 4 source briefs + 16 findings/reconciliation files at scripts/archive/ecan_pilot/ in the wiki repository. Cross-model triangulation by Claude orchestrator + Codex + Gemini.