Causal Simulations in WebPPL
Using physics simulations inside probabilistic programs.
This is part of a project trying to model the semantics and pragmatics of causal language in a rational speech acts framework using counterfactual simulation.
Some relevant papers:
- Gerstenberg, T., Peterson, M. F., Goodman, N. D., Lagnado, D. A., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2017). Eye-Tracking Causality. Psychological Science, 28(12), 1731–1744. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617713053
- Lucas, C. G., & Kemp, C. (2015). An improved probabilistic account of counterfactual reasoning. Psychological Review, 122(4), 700–734. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039655
- Frank, M. C., & Goodman, N. D. (2014). Inferring word meanings by assuming that speakers are informative. Cognitive Psychology, 75, 80–96. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2014.08.002
Installation
Dependencies:
Make a results directory at the top of this project directory.
mkdir results
Install node packages:
cd node_modules/utils/
npm install
Usage
webppl example.wppl --require utils
Then open results/example.html in a browser (Chrom works for sure) to view the animations for the sampled world.
You'll see a simulation of a sample from the world_prior where the velocity of at least one of balls is nonzero. E.g.
In a new webppl file, you can write these html viewer files by first collecting the worlds:
utils.write(world);
And later writing the complete file.
utils.finish("label_for_files");
The input to this function is the name of the .js and .html files. So, e.g. example.html was generated with utils.finish("example").
To download gifs, you need to start a file server, because I can't easily get it to work on the File protocol (security issues, sigh). In the top of this directory:
npm install http-server -g
http-server
Then in a browser, go to http://127.0.0.1:8080/results/example.html.