a2260cdaf6
This makes the output of the program more closely resemble that of the
original Copycat described in "FCCA" page 236:
> [T]he average final temperature of an answer can be thought of as
> the program's own assessment of that answer's quality, with lower
> temperatures meaning higher quality.
For example, running `python main.py abc abd ijk 100` produced the
following output:
ijl: 98 (avg temp 16.0)
jjk: 1 (avg temp 56.3)
ijk: 1 (avg temp 57.9)
And for `python main.py abc abd ijkk 100`:
ijkkk: 2 (avg temp 19.8)
ijkl: 51 (avg temp 28.1)
ijll: 46 (avg temp 28.9)
djkk: 1 (avg temp 77.4)
co.py.cat
An implementation of Douglas Hofstadter's copycat algorithm. The copycat algorithm is explained on Wikipedia, and that page has many links for deeper reading.
This implementation is a copycat of Scott Boland's Java implementation, but re-written into Python. It's not a direct translation - but based on his code. I did not carry over the GUI, as this version can more usefully be run from command line, or imported for use by other Python scripts.
In cases where I could not grok the Java implementation easily I took ideas from the LISP implementation, or directly from Melanie Mitchell's "Analogy-Making as Perception"
I also tried to make the code more pythonic.
Installation
There are no particular installation instructions, just clone and run, e.g.
$ git clone https://github.com/jalanb/co.py.cat.git
$ cd co.py.cat/copycat
$ python main.py abc abd ijk
Running
The script takes three arguments. The first two are a pair of triplets with some change, for example "abc" and "abd". The third is a triplet which the script should try to change analogously
For example the following invocation will probably display "ijl"
$ python main.py abc abd ijk