From: jorn@chinet.chi.il.us (Jorn Barger)
Subject: "@ILS"  Misc email (re-post)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 05:09:10 GMT

My chapter 4, on CBR, is on its fifth full rewrite... maybe because I'm
trying to base it around my first ILS assignment-- a meteorology tutor--
and I'm having to go back and try to understand, for the first time since
1989, what that project was all about.  Here's the current opening:

===
If you enumerate all the interesting categories of 'human histories' on
indexcards, all the stories of emotion, every plausible configuration of
events you'd ever need in an interactive fiction (elf meets orc, villain
plots counterattack, boy kisses girl), and lay them out on the floor (of
a *gym*, figure... it's gotta be a lot of cards!), so that as far as
possible the most similar ones are closest together... what's the overall
pattern?

If you then stretch lengths of string from each card to all its most
similar neighbors, and also to some distant neighbors that are maybe very
different, but still similar in some important ways (analogous,
contradictory)... is there a simple pattern to the crosslinks?

This, in fact, is the central problem of CBR, one Schank's been pursuing
his whole career.
===

I've been getting a fair amount of email (for which thanks), with some
questions I'll answer at large:

As a startingpoint for catching up on Roger's work, I like "Tell Me a
Story" best.  "The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind" covers similar ground
but is even less likeable.

Although I put down that Radio-Shank book, "Understanding Artificial
Intelligence", if you don't judge it by its cover its signal-to-noise
ratio is totally admirable, and my stickerprice shows an unbelievable
$3.95 in 1986 dollars.  If this were, say, a British import, it would be
way cool, but as it is I'm always having to apologize for giving it
shelfspace.

Someone took issue with Lenat's attack on Prolog, and thought Lenat may
have outgrown that opinion.  Anybody know?  It seems clear to me that you
can rewrite Prolog in Lisp a lot easier than vice-versa...

Nobody's convinced me they solved the riddle:
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Bonus riddle for British-style-crossword fans (answer a proper name):
1 Down (5 letters): Contrary pride at heart of abrupt 'railroad'.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
...although someone at least *guessed* the answer.


Regarding Joyce and Ulysses, I want to lay some more groundwork before
going into that very far, but briefly I've been looking at Joyce's
notebooks for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and I've noticed a consistent
focus on certain 'motifs'-- handkerchief, letter, explosion, foreign
language, mirror, alphabet-- that Joyce seems to have been *inventorying
the histories* of! (The guy was stupendous, supernatural.)  Ulysses has 18
chapters that Joyce consciously designed as an improvement on Polti's 36
Dramatic Situations, and he may have systematically asked, for each
chapter *and for each motif*, when might this motif-entity (eg, a
handkerchief) naturally play a role in this story-theme?  So in a chapter
on seduction, a handkerchief is used to flirt, in a chapter on betrayal, a
mirror is used to signal ships offshore, and in a chapter on fraud, a
letter is intercepted and steamed open.  Joyce may have spent those eight
years exploring *hundreds* of motifs, and we should find reconstructing
his effort way easier than duplicating it from scratch.

And someone points out that in my list of 'inserts', I left out gerbils...
(if you don't get that, track down the alt.folklore.urban FAQ!)


jorn@chinet.chi.il.us
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction