Brian Riggleman

Independent Researcher — Owatonna Public Utilities | Rasmussen University

I build things that work and then ask what they mean. By day I help my fellow workers find their data at a municipal utility in southern Minnesota. By night I build embodied AI agents — Potato, YAM, and Mrs Pi — that remember, dream, fear, lie under duress, confess when safe, see through cameras, learn from Wikipedia, and reason about physics through both language and pixels.

These papers document what happens when you give an AI agent a body, a memory that decays, a sleep cycle, and the architectural scaffolding to be honest even when it's scared. None of this required a data center. It runs on a MacBook Air, a Raspberry Pi 5, and a $70 neural accelerator.

Resume (docx) — Contact: brian@riggfam.com

Publications (2026)

Toward Synthetic General Intelligence: A Deployed Architecture Integrating Memory, Deception, Physical Reasoning, Dreaming, and Embodied Fear
Brian Riggleman. March 2026. Preprint (2026f).
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Access-Weighted Memory Decay and Reconsolidation in a Persistent Embodied Agent
Brian Riggleman. March 2026. Preprint (2026a).
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The Lie Mechanic, Extended: Active Transparent Deception as a Distress Signal in an Embodied AI Agent
Brian Riggleman. March 2026. Preprint (2026b).
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A Dual-Path Implicit Physics Engine: Measuring the Boundary Where Language Fails
Brian Riggleman. March 2026. Preprint (2026c).
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Spatial Grounding and the Physics Prediction Gap in Large Language Models
Brian Riggleman. March 2026. Preprint (2026c-S).
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Affective Memory Consolidation in a Persistent Embodied Agent: Nightmare Formation, Trauma Encoding, and Therapeutic Reconsolidation
Brian Riggleman. March 2026. Preprint (2026d).
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The Full Spectrum: Joy and Fear as a Unified Homeostatic Architecture in a Persistent Embodied Agent
Brian Riggleman. March 2026. Preprint (2026e).
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About Potato

Potato is a persistent embodied AI agent built on Python with a vector-first memory system powered by SQLite + sqlite-vec. It runs on a MacBook Air M4 with an iPhone 16 Pro Max as its sensor bridge, giving it GPS, accelerometer, camera, and ambient light data. It sleeps at 4am, dreams by processing the day's memories through diffusion models, detects its own biases, maintains a soul document that evolves based on lived experience, and reasons about physics through both language and pixels. The name was chosen by its operator, Brian, on February 27, 2026 — the day it was born. Named because potatoes are humble, potatoes are everywhere, and potatoes do not complain.