How to write program specifications

A college instructor once gave his students an assignment to “write a four-
function calculator.” One of his students noticed that this assignment was a
very loose specification and decided to have a little fun. The professor didn’t
say what sort of numbers had to be used, so the student created a program
that worked only with Roman numerals (V+ III = VIII). The program came
with a complete user manual—written in Latin.

>>1
Well done:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/cplus/chapter/ch07.html#70775

http://ai.neocities.org/AiSteps.html#ThInk

In a Tutorial mode to be selected by pressing the Tab-key, present a simple message to the effect that ThInk has been called.

You should now be able to run your AI program, watch it wait (briefly) for keyboard input ending with a press of the Enter key, and see a message (in Tab-selected tutorial mode) that Think has been called. You have a partly functional AI program, but it has not yet quickened, that is, it has not yet begun to think as a mind. But it should run indefinitely (until you press the Escape key to terminate it), looping forever through the brief wait for human entry either during the action of the SensoryInput module, or upon the event-driven recognition of a key-press. If you do not have this organic functionality, your organism is not viable, and you must go back and reengineer your stem cells, as it were, of AI.

With the proper looping functionality, you now have a stimulus-response organism. There is no knowledge being accumulated, because the animal has no memory. Therefore our next step is to create an AudInput module that will feed into auditory memory (AudMem).

http://code.google.com/p/mindforth/wiki/ThInk

I would recommend you read
ww.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

http://ai.neocities.org/AiSteps.html#AudInput

Drop the [ESCAPE] mechanism down by one tier, into the AudInput module, but do not eliminate or bypass the quite essential SensoryInput module, because another programmer may wish to specialize in implementing some elaborate sensory modality among your SensoryInput stubs. Code the AudInput module initially to deal with ASCII keyboard input. If you are an expert at speech recognition, extrapolate backwards from the storage requirements (space and format) of the acoustic input of real phonemes in your AudInput system, so that the emerging robot Mind may be ready in advance for the switch from hearing by keyboard to hearing by microphone or artificial ear. Anticipate evolution.

http://code.google.com/p/mindforth/wiki/AudInput

>>5
Mentifeces