tmct  

One question, more than one fact

Some questions do not answer from a single fact. Teach a rule with two branches, rule one branch out, and /prove works the other by cases. This is a real exchange with the engine, run before this page was built, not a mockup.

tmct> every pet is a cat or a dog
noted — remembered 4 facts: cat-or-dog rdf:type class; cat-or-dog owl:unionOf cat; cat-or-dog owl:unionOf dog; pet rdfs:subClassOf cat-or-dog
tmct> rex is a pet
noted — remembered: rex is a pet
tmct> rex is not a cat
noted — remembered: no rex is a cat
/prove is rex a dog
yes — you told me: cat-or-dog is either cat (source: ace:chat:<session-id>@<timestamp>); you told me: rex is a pet (source: teach:chat:<session-id>@<timestamp>); you told me: rex is not a cat (source: teach:chat:<session-id>@<timestamp>); you told me: pet is a kind of cat-or-dog (source: ace:chat:<session-id>@<timestamp>); you told me: cat-or-dog is either dog (source: ace:chat:<session-id>@<timestamp>); in every case — a cat or a dog — rex is a dog.

More on how /classify and /prove work on chat-about.html.

The feed runs through the same /news command

news.html is a dashboard, but the feed underneath it is one chat command. Type /news poll in any chat session and it runs the same poll-ground-rank loop, then reports it as text. This is a real exchange with the engine, run before this page was built, not a mockup.

/news
no news items yet — poll a source or teach something first.

Goal (inferred): Surface or work the news feed built over this graph.

/news poll
polled 1 source: 2 new items, 1 fact stored, 0 derived, 0 failures, 0 evicted.

Goal (inferred): Surface or work the news feed built over this graph.

/news rank
1. wombat (2) — unknown word
2. marsupial (1) — unknown word
3. nocturnal (1) — unknown word

Goal (inferred): Surface or work the news feed built over this graph.

More on how polling, grounding and ranking work on news-about.html.

Grounding a question from Wikipedia

A term the graph has never seen gets an honest miss. Ask it to research the topic and it fetches Simple English Wikipedia, reads the article's opening passage, and stores what it can ground as a fact, cited back to the page it read. This is a real exchange with the engine, run before this page was built, not a mockup.

tmct> what is an aardvark
I don't know "aardvark" yet — teach me directly, e.g. "aardvark is an <thing>" or "remember aardvark is an <thing>".
tmct> research aardvark
aardvark — The aardvark is a mammal from Africa; its name means "earth pig" in the language Afrikaans. It is the only living member in its order, though some fossil genera have been found (source: research article "Aardvark", Simple English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark?oldid=10916573)
stored 1 fact from "Aardvark". queued 3 linked topics: Africa, Afrikaans, Binomial nomenclature — "research next" fetches the next one (the page's play button does this for you).
tmct> what is an aardvark
i learned: aardvark is a kind of mammal (source: research:aardvark@0)

More on where a live Wikipedia read's trust tier comes from on chat-about.html.

Run the chat yourself

npm install -g @polycode-projects/the-mechanical-code-talker

Point it at a repo's graph and ask about the code. This runs against examples/mini-webapp, which ships in the repo:

tmct> what talks to store.mjs?
src/handlers/tasks.mjs and src/handlers/users.mjs.
tmct> which modules do not import logger?
…
tmct> /exit

Or start with nothing. tmct bootstraps an empty memory and remembers what you tell it. Use tmct chat --repo /path/to/repo to point it at your own.

tmct init         # scaffold .tmct/, tmct.toml, seed the default persona + provenance
tmct viz          # write the ledger page — see the link below
tmct syllogise    # offline: pre-derive entailed facts (a maintenance job)

Facts don't have to come entirely from teaching. tmct's own corpus already knows a dog can bark; teach it that Rover is a dog and it reasons the rest, citing both facts it chained through:

tmct> Rover is a dog.
noted — remembered 1 fact: rover rdf:type dog

Goal (inferred): Teach/remember a new fact.

Canonical: rover rdf:type dog — fact("rover", "rdf:type", "dog")

tmct> Does Rover bark?
yes — dog can bark (source: corpus:human /r/CapableOf) — via: rover is a dog (source: ace:chat:<session-id>@<timestamp>)

A chatbot in the ELIZA/PARRY lineage, obsessed with software the way PARRY was obsessed with the mafia. Interpretation is mechanical and memory is an OWL-labelled graph on disk. It starts stocked with an everyday vocabulary. Point it at a codebase and it reasons over that too.

Use it as a library

The chat surface is a function. Feed it lines, read the answers, and the same grounding and provenance rules apply.

import { Readable } from "node:stream";
import { runChat } from "@polycode-projects/the-mechanical-code-talker";

await runChat({
  repoPath: "./my-repo",
  input: Readable.from([
    "ahab is the father of john\n",
    "who is the father of john\n",
    "/exit\n",
  ]),
  output: process.stdout,
});

Full feature list, the detailed-answer pipeline, and the rest of the library API in the README.