Myallo has the ability to learn and improve its accuracy at finding interesting articles. For it to do this efficiently, you must create an interest profile, run agent sessions with it, and adjust the interests in it to give the agent feedback on how well it is doing.
You can adjust the detail settings inside an interest to affect the learning process. Some aspects of the agent itself can also be adjusted, such as the starting points it uses to make its search.
Myallo can do useful searching even with a minimal interest profile. For example, if you quickly make a profile which just has one interest in it named "gardening," Myallo will indeed be able to use it to find articles that include the word "gardening." You can even use an completely empty profile and the "Fast Lookup..." command to do a search, as described near the beginning of this guide. It might be handy for fast searches, but the Agent can't do any significant learning with a profile that is so simple, and it's not really much more useful than using a search engine directly.
If you develop a more complete profile that describes many of your interests and the relationships between them, you can use that same profile repeatedly to find new articles. If you adjust the interest levels in the results after each search session, Myallo's automatic adjustments to all the related Interests may quickly enable it to find more interesting articles than before.
Using a wide-ranging profile like the General Profile that comes with Myallo can help give you relevent results, and it is suggested that you use a profile such as this.
Adjusting the settings in an interest is the main way Myallo learns. All you need to do is correct the interest levels Myallo has predicted for each result when necessary. When you adjust an interest level, the agent will make automatic adjustments to other interests related to it.
You can control which interests are related to others by setting up interests, sub-interests, and aliases in a hierarchical profile. Sub-interests are indented under their "parent" Interest and are "children" of the parent.
You can control more of the learning process by adjusting some detail settings inside the interests. Normally, this step is not necessary.
Breaking down a general interest by adding sub-interests will allow you to specify how interested you are in each sub-category. This gives Myallo a better idea of what types of articles in the category will be most interesting. For example, instead of making one Interest for "computers" you could make three, one for "computers" and two more indented under it for "Macintosh" and "Windows". Then you could specify how interested you are in each of those computer terms, as well as in computers overall.
The more you subdivide Interests, the more accurate the search can be and the more potential for learning exists.
Myallo uses Aliases to show which interests relate to the articles it finds. You can also add aliases to the profile.
To create an alias, select the original interest and choose "Make Alias" from the Interest menu. A new alias interest will appear under the original. You can then drag the alias wherever you want.
If one of your interests seem to belong under more than one interest category, you can place aliases under the other categories to show the relationship.
The main settings for an interest are its name, check mark, and location. These can be changed directly in the Profile window.
The detail settings for an Interest include its decay rate, satisfaction level, and level locks. The "Show Details" command in the Profile window opens the Details drawer, which exposes these controls. The controls adjust detail settings for whichever interest is currently selected in the main window.
The Details drawer also shows the date and time the interest was created and last modified.
The drawer also shows the advanced search string for the interest. You can enter a "regex pattern" string here to tell Myallo to do a more complex matching instead of simply matching on the interest name. The appendix explains more about advanced search strings.
Normally you should keep the Decay and Satisfaction sliders in their center positions, and the locks unlocked.
The Satisfaction slider affects how satisfactory the interest is in evaluating articles. The center setting has no effect. Settings toward the right express more satisfaction and can "amplify" some of the relevance calculations such that the interest has more emphasis on the evaluation process than usual. Settings toward the left express dissatisfaction and introduce a random element to the evaluation process. Non-center satisfaction settings tend to adjust slowly toward the central position over time, based on several factors including the decay setting and relevance calculations. Locking the satisfaction level will prevent this.
The Decay slider tells Myallo if, and how quickly, it should automatically adjust the satisfaction level toward its center position. In the normal, center position, the "usual" adjustment is made. When set toward the left, the adjustment is made more slowly, when set to the right it is made more quickly.
The "Preferences" command in the Edit menu allows you to adjust some characteristics of the agent. In particular, you can adjust its search limits and search starting points.
In general it is best to have one, big profile that reflects all your interests in a wide variety of topics, but if you do a lot of searches in one particular area, perhps sports, law, or medicine, you might want to have profiles for them. For example, you might have one particular profile that details your interests in medicine. For this profile, you might tell Myallo's agent to use search sites that call upon search engines specifically oriented toward the medical profession.
The Internet is vast, and the Myallo agent will happily search all day, examining and ranking thousands of potential articles. As a practical matter, limits are imposed to keep each search session from using up an unreasonable amount of time and resources.
You can tell the agent to:
- Stop after it has been searching for a specified amount of time.
- Stop after it has evaluated a specified number of potential articles.
- Not evaluate more than a specified number of "discovered" links per candidate article.
- Not follow a chain of discovered links deeper than a specified number.
- Not add more than a specified number of results to the profile per search session.
When the agent is called upon to find candidate articles that match a particular interest category, it uses starting points to begin.
A search site describes a location where candidate articles might be found, or a searching facility that can find articles that mention a topic. The agent will check the location or use the searching facility to generate some initial candidates for its search.
The Preferences command shows a list of search sites that are built into Myallo. The default setting is for the Agent to use one site that does a general search of the Internet, but you can change it, or make the Agent use multiple search sites. Using multiple sites might make for better results, but it will increase the time and network traffic necessary to make a complete search.
A typical search site would query a search engine on the Internet. Only a search engine that handles a URL-based query can be used. Many search engines can do this. The Agent uses the settings in the search site definition to formulate a URL that queries the search engine. The results of the query (a Web page of HTML) is returned to the Agent, which scans it for URLs of articles to investigate further.
Myallo includes a built-in Spotlight search site, which can be enabled if you have Mac OS X 1.4 (Tiger) or above. It will use the system's Spotlight feature to search the text content of all the local files on your computer. If you enable this site, the results will include listings for files on your computer which are interesting according to your profile.
The details of creating a new search site is covered in the appendix.