From: jorn@chinet.chi.il.us (Jorn Barger)
Subject: IF Theory Article
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 22:16:06 GMT

Here's an article I wrote for the JCGD a couple of issues ago:

Representing Stories: History, and a New Approach
by Jorn Barger

Abstract: To pack the maximum story content into the smallest memory, you
need a concise vocabulary that can summarize the full range of human
behavior.  If person, place, thing, and motive are taken to be the simple
elements of such a vocabulary, the primitive compounds should be the
standard *relationships* that any two (or more) of these normally display.


While the ancestry of story representation includes the I Ching, Roget's
Thesaurus, and Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations, the modern ambassador of
story representation in the world of artificial intelligence is surely
Roger Schank.  During the 70s at Yale, Schank pioneered an approach to AI
that involved building storybases in memory, and achieved what still stand
as the only successful natural language translation systems, albeit within
extremely limited domains.

Schank's student James Meehan's Talespin was an excellent prototype for
interactive fiction, stumblingly building aesop-like fables.  It was
impossible to scale up, though, and was absurdly *brittle*, lacking the
sort of common-sense background knowledge that Doug Lenat's Cyc project is
hoping to provide, through its slow, painful, memory-extravagant brute-
force attack.

The prospect of a videogame appealing to a Cyc server for every little
nuance of projected reality, is horrifying to contemplate: realtime is no
time for *inferencing*!  I want to propose a neat, Schankian end run, in
the form of a database of standard stories that, by simple recombinations,
give birth to a rich microworld.

The cornerstone of this system lies in that hoary old trio: person place
and thing.  But we add to that a little psychology: a typology of human
*motives*: food comfort sex respect family self-expression.  And then we
ask, for any two of these "initials"-- person place thing motive-- what
are their normal relationships?

Persons may go to places, or leave them, or traverse them, etc.  Persons
may make things, use things, acquire things.  Persons may suffer motives,
pursue satisfaction of them, satisfy them.  And persons should have
standard relationships to other persons, too.  They may be kin, or sexual
partners, they may communicate, or cooperate, or conflict with each other.

A story may involve one person weighing two motives, or one person
achieving gratification of a motive by an exchange with another person
whose motive may be different.

A story will be a sequence of relationships, changing in time.  By
exploring these relationships combinatorically, and the simple stories
they generate... well, it might give a deeper weight to the concept of
'virtual reality'.

Table (abbreviated):
person-thing relationships: make acquire use break destroy
person-place relationships: go-to leave stay possess defend
person-motive rel's: gratify suffer
motive-motive rel's: tradeoff substitute
person-person-thing rel's: give take
etc.

jorn barger
jorn@chinet.chi.il.us

ps: coming soon: the relevance of joyce's ulysses to IF!
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction