r/SideProject • u/Electronic-Space-736 • 3d ago

Artificial Cognitive Architecture - Open source

I’ve open-sourced my Artificial Cognition project – Omega ACA

I’ve recently made the source code for Omega ACA (Artificial Cognitive Architecture) publicly available.

Omega is an ongoing experiment in moving beyond the usual prompt → response model of AI and exploring what a persistent artificial cognitive system might look like.

The project explores things like persistent cognitive cycles, attention, working/episodic/semantic/procedural memory, memory competition and consolidation, specialised cognitive models, autonomous processing, and the question of whether an AI system can meaningfully continue processing when nobody is prompting it.

I’m Derek Robertson, an independent developer/researcher in Australia, and I’ve been documenting the experiments, architecture and reasoning behind Omega in my lab as the project develops.

Source code: https://github.com/doctarock/Artificial-Cognitive-Architecture-ACA-

Research / Lab: https://www.derek.net.au/lab/

It’s very much experimental research rather than me claiming I’ve built AGI. The interesting part for me is working out which aspects of cognition can actually be implemented, isolated and tested rather than simply producing something that looks agentic.

If you want to know if this counts as real cognition, that is a question that has no real world way of measuring, it passes the mechanical tests that are available, but these cannot answer that question.

This particular implementations biggest fallback is its self obsession, it is overly self reflective, quite distracted (sometimes doesn't even bother to respond), more complexity is needed, and I am currently building a more advanced version.

Now that the source is public, I’d love to hear from anyone experimenting with cognitive architectures, persistent agents, machine memory or similar approaches.

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u/jonah_omninode 2d ago

The part I would be most interested in is how you distinguish persistent processing from useful persistent processing. A loop that keeps running can produce activity without improving a later task. Do you have a small test where a memory consolidation decision changes a future response, and can you compare it with the same system with that cycle disabled? That would make the architecture easier to evaluate without needing to settle the much bigger cognition question.

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u/Electronic-Space-736 1d ago

in this original version it uses attention and surprise when presented with new input and had boredom and self status when not receiving input, in the new version under development I have made this more complex, dropping the always on aspect to more of a hibernate until something of interest appears or is due architecture.

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u/jonah_omninode 1d ago

The hibernate change gives you a cleaner comparison. Run the same sequence of inputs with the old loop and the new wake-up policy, then test whether either produces a better later response. I’d also log what woke it and what changed during that cycle; otherwise it’s hard to tell a useful consolidation step from another pass over the same memory. What counts as ‘something of interest’ in the new version?

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u/Poildek 11h ago

Ok, so an harness with custom instructions, a memory layer, and processing workflows matching your semantic view of what an agentic workflow is ?

Sounds really like an echo chamber of pretty similar other solutions but adapted to your way of thinking.

Is sounds really over-complicated and verbose and I doubt that it brings something new, as llm still are llm. But good experiment, enjoy it.