Something like the ASTRID system doesn't happen overnight. A full decade of research and development seems a long time, but it is very short considering that thousands of scientists and developers over the stretch of nearly 75 years couldn't solve the problem. Putting General Intelligence into a machine and make it learn like we humans do has even been deemed impossible.

Still, during those 75 years great insights were found that made up the scientific field of Symbolic AI, the foundation that led to the realization of the ASTRID system. Homage must be paid to the great pioneers of Artificial Intelligence that laid the groundwork for what we achieved in the last ten years.

The development of ASTRID has therefor been a clear case of “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants”. Starting with the strong foundation of a Symbolic Approach to Artificial Intelligence, and augmenting that with the ability to actually learn autonomously, is what has made the ASTRID project into what it is today.

However, it is not only the Artificial Intelligence researchers of the Symbolic AI era that were pivotal in the development. To find the needed insights to create ASTRID, Hans Peter did research across several scientific domains. Neural Science, Behavioral Science, Data and Computer Science, (Early) Child Development and even Anthropology are all areas of interest when you want to build a human-like brain.

One significant driver behind the realization of the ASTRID system is the availability of the Codedness Development Platform. Build on top of the first generation Code Generator that Hans Peter developed and build years ago, and that was used in the early stages of the ASTRID development, Codedness is a completely integrated system that accelerates development many folds.

Codedness IDE is a fully Integrated Development Environment (hence the 'IDE' in the name), covering multi-user development with granular authorization and access-level control, integrated template engine that caters for any target platform to run the code on, fully integrated versioning of all project assets, full project management and tracking facilities, and much more.

Codedness is basically where Model-Driven Architecture meets DevOps: Generating fully useable applications from a basic model and integrating that with a full-stack deployment infrastructure.

Having this tool-stack also resulted in MIND|CONSTRUCT having all custom build and fully tailored applications in operation for Project Management, Knowledge Management, Finance, Human Resource Management, Quality Control and Customer/Client Relationship Management.

MIND|CONSTRUCT is a CMM Level 2/3 company. We are now in the process of moving to CMMI. We expect to hit CMMI Maturity Level 2 later this year, and CMMI Maturity Level 3 in the first half of next year.

We adopted the Capability Maturity Model (CMM/CMMI) many years ago as our main model for Quality Control. The Capability Maturity Model aims specifically at software companies, but we also decided on this choice because CMM/CMMI looks at the whole company, in all its facets, as a mechanism for excellence. The Capability Maturity Model is not just an assessment model, it is an actual toolkit to build excellence into a (software) company. As we strive for excellence here at MIND|CONSTRUCT, the Capability Maturity Model is a natural fit for us.

Based on the CMMI advisory documents, our development process caters for automatic generation, and incremental rebuilding, of all technical project assets and documentation. This ensures that all technical documentation is constantly up-to-date with the current state of our technology.

Besides a clear focus on Quality as a driver for success, the way we manage our huge amount of research and development documentation has been paramount in achieving our technological goals. To this end, we developed our in-house Knowledge Management platform. It caters for near instant access to any relevant information that is available in the vast amount of project data we have accumulated in more than a decade. It also ensures that we protect all relevant knowledge against loss through key individuals.

Because most of the ASTRID technology is proprietary, not much has been published about its research and development over the previous years. However, Hans Peter's paper on Machine Consciousness has been referred to as being “The current BEST statement of criteria required that might mark the development of Consciousness in a machine system.” (Machine Dreaming and Consciousness, J.F. Pagel).

New papers and articles will emerge in the (near) future and added here as soon as they are published.

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