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From: jorn@chinet.chi.il.us (Jorn Barger)
Subject: "Was: Barger@ILS"  Chapter 5, Random Images
Message-ID: <C1rvwB.Kqn@chinet.chi.il.us>
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1993 13:52:58 GMT
Lines: 174


====================================================================
                        "Was: Barger@ILS"
                   (memoirs of an a.i. hacker)
                          by Jorn Barger

           Chapter 5: Random images, parsers, buttons
====================================================================

[God, I really *brag* in this one.  Apologies.  I'm sure lots of
people are puking at the way I use smilies, too.  Well f*** you! ;^)]

Standing back from the last chapter, on CBR, it seems obviously to
boil down to one elegant question:  what does it mean for one story to
be *simpler* than another?  (Any part of a story must be simpler than
the whole, is a partial answer.)

One might visualize the network of human histories as concentric
circles (or spheres), with a central point of *zero story content*,
the "null story", each ring adding a single quantum (!) of story
content.  Reallife instances will necessarily have infinite content
(where, exactly, *is* that grain of dust between the ridges of your
left indexfingertip?), so instances must stand as far from the null-
content origin, as the sphere of stars is from our starry stares....

But can these content 'atoms' be enumerated?  Are they finite?  What
are the toplevel headings of our story-inventory-textbook-tree? 
(Well, here's my answer: first-- person place thing motive, second--
person place thing motive again, and third-- the set of all simple
relationships between whatever you choose for those first two.  But
the last time I said that publically, I got viciously terminated for
my trouble, so I'm still a bit *skittish*... ;^) ((Puzzle clue: ILS
has the not-invented-here syndrome real bad, where 'here' = between
Roger's Rs!))


Back to 1989, or 1990, some random images:

There was a party I went to where someone described Schank's
methodology as 'mere' introspection, to which I said, yea-verily.  How
else do you see what's going on inside you?  ***Refusing to introspect
doesn't make you objective, coming to terms with your self-deluding,
self-denying impulses makes you objective!***  So great literature is
objective, but not at all *cold*.


Almost everything I can say about *parsers at ILS* is hearsay, because
I almost never saw one-- ILS philosophy is (correctly, I think) that
the parser problem is too hard to bother with until the CBR-inventory-
of-human-stories problem is solved.  According to legend, Roger's old
company, Cognitive Systems, managed to create only a single AI product
that was actually used: an email router for a bank, called ATRANS.  I
heard ATRANS described as a *case-based* parser, because it works by
exhaustively annotating every turn of phrase this bank-office-email-
router might need to understand.  (This illustrates the Schankian
principle of AI as the ability to handle realworld-scale casebases
without drowning.  See Schank's ILS tech report, "Where's the AI?"
...or on second thought, don't bother, my paraphrase is probably
adequate ;^)

Every so often on comp.ai, someone will inquire after a Schankian CD-
parser, expecting that ILS (or someone) must have something they've
been maintaining and evolving since the 70s.  But CD is acknowledged
at ILS as hopelessly unwieldy, and the 'next thing' has yet to arrive. 
(Charles Martin's Direct Memory Access Parser DMAP was the theoretical
rage for a month or two-- I was almost reassigned to try and code it--
but it's also wholly dependent on the (expected) invention of an
elegant CBR-memory to parse directly into!)
[End of parsers part.]

A random poetic image from 1989, for armchair freudians and sex-magic
mystics: once I'd established my competence, I was given a big raise
and moved to a better office, by Schank himself.  (The symbolism of
chairs and offices at ILS is an adventure unto itself...)  The night
*before* I got this seal of approval, I had a dream that Roger
*invited me into his bed*.... (praise dog, I woke up! ;^)

Which reminds me of another story: at a certain point I was assigned
to index some randomly chosen stories (on video-- see next chapter),
which happened to be Chris Riesbeck reminiscing about Roger's *chair-
fetish*.  Chris told a story of Roger's spending a term in
Switzerland, at some outfit where the director had the only 'good'
chair in the building, so every morning Roger would steal it from the
director's office, and every evening (!?) the director would claim it
back.  I resigned the challenge, because the indexings I was coming up
with were operatic-prima-donna, or rock-star-with-M&Ms (see a.f.u FAQ
again, I think, for the M&Ms). I see now I coulda gone with bully-
forces-other-short-end-of-stick (which can be made to sound fine if
you rephrase 'bully' to 'macho stud').

Also, the big raise had a hidden cloudlining (an eternal ILS verity):
I was told it would be retroactive to September, and celebrated by
buying an expensive piece of fine art (a huge, pretty Calman Shemi
wall hanging, if you didn't wanna know).  When the raise came, the
retroactive-to-September part turned out to be just 5%, with the other
30 or 40% starting from then on....


"Button theory" shows Schank at his most *bozoic*-- my unconscious
mental image is of a brightly colored clownsuit with a row of fluffy
pompoms down the front.  Actual ILS software, currently consuming
sponsors' funds, greets the user with a row of Schankian button-icons,
the most conspicuous of which eternally drools "HUH?"

Button theory started from a seminar where a list of usual-educational-
software-control-commands was compiled, with the admirable idea that
ILS software would uniformly use a single panel of buttons for these
uniform commands.  The list included:

more/ less detail
what now?
why?
review
too slow/ fast
jump ahead
change tasks

The whole list, after repeated boilings-down, was still around 20
commands, and the proposed panels of icons overwhelmed the remaining
screen area, while boggling one with their obscurity.

I had a hunch that there was an elegant design solution possible, and
cooked up a panel of 20-or-so tiny 16-by-16-pixel Mac icons, unified
by the (pc!) theme of Kid Button and her/his bike trip, following a
natural chronology from preparation to starting out to taking a break
to returning home to reviewing the day, with an 'uphill strain' icon
and a 'downhill out-of-control' icon, etc etc etc.  It was completely
ignored by Schank, but the design principle of "The Menu Is A Story"
stayed with me-- even the Macintosh 'File' menu tells a chronological 
Open-Close-Quit  story (by this principle, it ought to be arranged
Open-Save-Print-Close-Quit).

This principle was also visible in the natural shape that my 1987-88
*inventory of histories of romantic love* had taken.  I read every
love poem in every anthology in every library and bookstore I could
get to (can you guess? it was unrequited ;^/ ), and compiled the best
images into a frame that went from loneliness through courtship thru
failed courtship, successful courtship, relationship and breakup.  I
drafted similar structures for business psych (starting-a-business to
bankruptcy, sending-a-resume to termination) and several others.  But
there are no anthologies of brilliantly evoked business stories, so
this framework remains relatively unfilled-in!  Ditto, interestingly,
for relationship-problem stories.  I was reduced to self-help books! 
(And then there was the mortifying foul-up where I returned one of
these to the wrong library branch and had to spend *literally months*
arguing about whether I owed them for "Love Stinks: true tales of jerk-
ass boyfriends" or some such... ;^)  One interesting result of the
romance research was the vivid demonstration that human love-histories
(!) are identical whether you're talking ancient Egypt, aborigine,
medieval China, Swahili, or Palookaville...


I also suggested around ILS, once or twice, resigned, that the
buttonpanel be implemented as a *tool palette*, so that you could
point to any part of the screen with, eg, the Huh? tool, an idea I see
from Computer Gaming World is now common in point-and-click adventure
interfaces, where Huh? will likely appear as a magnifying glass
cursor/icon.  The latest issue of CGW also mentions a forthcoming game
where each object has its own set of verbs-- a boombox has insert-
tape, play-tape, etc-- (object-oriented adventuring!), and another
with an MIT-developed pop-up-right-under-your-current-mouse-position
diamond-of-icons, and a *really cool* sounding trick where you can
"take movies" of what you see and *play them later* for others, as a
way to talk without typing. (Wish I'd thought of *that*!  What an IF-
challenge, to build puzzles around that new form of *competence*!) 
The ILS design-stratum had a consistent scorn for the emerging
conventions of Mac interface, and things generally had to be
implemented so compleat idiots (like captains of industry) wouldn't be
embarrassed by them-- so tool palettes were effectively out of reach.

[Next episode: ASK systems-- AI in SuperCard!]

Jorn Barger    jorn@chinet.chi.il.us    (was:  barger@ils.nwu.edu)

