Building Edward: episodic memory, affect, and two kinds of “learning” on a graph

A progress note on the Edward brain prototype: from raw text to recall, mood, and pattern chaining.

What we set out to do

Edward is a small personal episodic memory experiment: each line of user input becomes part of a time-sliced narrative (Moments), tied to Concept nodes in Neo4j, with affect represented as VAD (valence, arousal, dominance on 0–1). The system does not just store tokens—it recalls related graph context before committing the line, blends that recall into the current emotional state, then learns two complementary structures: undirected co-occurrence (SYNAPSE) and ordered sequence (CHAIN_NEXT).