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From: Russell L. Bryan <rbryan@Mail.trincoll.edu>
Subject: Re: Searching for a sense of wonder
Message-ID: <1992Nov16.223751.24608@starbase.trincoll.edu>
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Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 22:37:51 GMT
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In article <BxttrL.E6x@acsu.buffalo.edu> Phil Goetz,
goetz@acsu.buffalo.edu writes:
>3.  (You're going to scream at this one.)  Adventures just don't present
you
>with situations where you even WANT to use most grammatical constructs.
>Observe a 2-year old baby.  This baby gets what it wants in the world
with
>2 or 3-word utterances, i.e. "Go!  Get egg!" or "Want more doggie!" 
You, in
>the adventure, are like that baby.  The ways you want to interact with
the
>world are quite restricted.  You are giving orders to a puppet.

Yes!  This is the reason why true interactive fiction is impossible. 
Puzzles are really the simplest challenge possible to implement within a
game.  I can think of no puzzle which can not be solved with simple
sentences.  Take Towers of Hanoi -- the best algorithm is about nine
lines of code long, and to represent it in English it is no more
difficult than "Move A to C, Move B to C, move C to A," etc.  I apologize
for my loose word of the use parser -- I've written a number of syntactic
parsers myself, and I admit they are extremely simple once the basic
principles are known.  It's the semantics which can be hell, and you just
tapped the surface.  Try to teach a computer to know that "the king is
pregnant" is a ridiculous premise.  Try to inform a computer that when
you say "I saw the golden gate bridge flying into San Francisco," you are
not trying to redefine the meaning of "suspension bridge."

-- Russ
