Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Path: gmd.de!ira.uka.de!scsing.switch.ch!news.univie.ac.at!paladin.american.edu!gatech!darwin.sura.net!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!att!mcdchg!chinet!jorn
From: jorn@chinet.chi.il.us (Jorn Barger)
Subject: "Was: Barger@ILS"  Chapter 6  (Ask Tom)
Message-ID: <C1uAJK.2Bw@chinet.chi.il.us>
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1993 21:04:31 GMT
Lines: 164

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

              Chapter 6:  Ask Tom (AI in SuperCard!)
====================================================================

So after the weather project was cancelled, I got juggled around for a
week or two and then offered this swat-team 'one month' easy-showpiece
top-priority project already named "Ask Tom", a passive hypervideo
'browser' for exploring a *storybase of videoclips* of a top Arthur
Andersen trust-banking expert, telling accounting-consulting 'war
stories'.

Early on in the project, I bemoaned my sense of hypocrisy that all we
were doing was making a *really conventional* textbook of trust-
banking, with the cross-references hardwired in, but Larry Birnbaum
explained, in a fatherly talk that was a turningpoint in my
reconciliation to ILS's homely-looking ambitions, that the general
problem of *how to build a coherent outline for *any* arbitrary domain
of knowledge* was as important a question as any in AI.  Yes, Larry
said, Roget (the thesaurus-ist) was doing AI, as is, after a fashion,
*any* bright popularizer trying to make a complex domain accessible to
the general reader.  Looking back on Ask Tom, I now see pretty much
*every* important abstraction of AI programming, hardwired into...
SuperCard.

(SuperCard, for you non-Mac readers, is a more-powerful version of
HyperCard, the breakthru 'paint'-an-application application.  It's
*really* easy to use, and so, on the surface, seems beneath a
professional-AI-macho-stud's contempt.)


There was also something wildly disproportionate about spending
hundreds of thousands of dollars putting high-quality video into an
application, when all the video showed was an accountant's talking
head!  (The S/N here seems about a googol times worse than an ascii
transcription of his words. ;^)  But I actually feel this was a sort of
heroic pragmatism, that if video-based educational software is worth
exploring at all, it's gonna cost astronomical sums and deliver very
little at first.  You might as well start with talking heads, because
filming the trust bank itself would be a *lot* more expensive!


The semi-flashy 'gimmick' that made "Ask Tom" special was that Roger
wanted us to come up with a simple, consistent view of the storybase
where, after seeing a storyclip, one would always be presented with the
same 'meta-menu' of followup clips, or rather followup-clip *types*. 
The theoretical rationalization was to be derived from an old paper of
Roger's on "cognitive associative categories", which looked at the
sorts of ways an ordinary human conversation can change course. (You
can stay on the topic, or shift in the direction of some subtopic,
etc.)  So one of our tasks was to compile an inclusive list of all the
sorts of followup a browser might enjoy, and then boil it down to a
short-list that would look graceful on the SuperCard screen!

We all watched hours of accounting-video so we'd be able to 'ground'
our speculative proposals in concrete examples.  And the final list of
"CAC-links" (cogn-asso-cate, above) included just eight: background,
results, context, examples, warnings, opportunities, alternatives, and
indicators.  So after seeing Tom talk about the difference between
small and large banks, say, you might be offered followups that talked
about why some banks grow and others don't, or examples of each, or the
implications of bank-size for a trust consultant, what to look out for
if it's a small bank rather than a large one, etc.

As this list was distilled from the much-longer list, categories were
necessarily merged, and the most general label chosen to include them
both, so these final eight labels were necessarily rather vague, and
it's not at all clear to me that they're really *useful*, compared to
just listing the same followup stories in order of interestingness,
say.  And worst, a whole class of Schankian CACs got ignored, because
there was no way to include them simply: Schank's original article
focussed most on links of the type:  same-person, same-object, same-
theme, etc... but our spec just didn't allow the complexity of
enumerating the persons, objects, and themes in a story so that you
could choose the one you wanted to followup via...


The screen display was designed on a spec that consisted of Roger
waving his hands to suggest a network of nodes in a black 3-D outer
space, twisting parallaxically as you move from node to node.  With
SuperCard's limited animation capabilities, we re-imaged this as a
SuperCard 'card' for each storyclip, represented with a central story-
card surrounded by eight peripheral *pseudo-3D stacks* of story-cards,
one for each of the eight CAC-links, forming a 'lotus' (or 'crown of
thorns', on bad-fridays).  The parallax-twisting ended up looking more
like Vegas poker-dealing....


This was the first ILS project that required the function of "media
indexer," which is now an official ILS job-title, borne with diffident
pride by dozens of ILS employees. (As clerical jobs go, it's definitely
on the interesting end of the scale, or would be if project-management
hierarchies were a little more enlightened.)  All the links from story
to story in the Ask-Tom casebase had to be 'hand-crafted' or hardwired,
which ultimately meant looking at every possible pair of clips and
asking whether either would make an interesting followup to the other,
and which of the eight CAC-links it made most sense under.

So the network as a whole was just a stack of screens, almost
identical, where the CAC-cards were implemented as buttons that 'moved'
that card to center screen.  The programming task was writing 'meta-
code' that made these standardized screens *self-generating* (given the
card titles and what-was-linked-to-what)....


I said earlier that I felt, at first, we were just writing a not-very-
special hypertextbook, but the textbook-outline aspect of Ask Tom was
completely perpendicular to the CAC-browser.  Since the CAC-browser
*had* to be perfectly homogeneous, with exactly the same sort of links
no matter where in the network you stood, there was a need for an
external 'orienting-structure', if nothing else so that you didn't
always have to begin at the same point in the network.

This we called the 'zoomer' as opposed to the 'browser', suggesting
vertical versus horizontal movement, and implemented finally as a very 
*witty* hierarchical sequence of graphical representations of trust-
banking meta-concepts: the toplevel screen identified the four main
'players' in the trust-banking-consulting game: Andersen-as-an-
institution, the individual Andersen consultant (who was taken to be
the user of the storybase), the client bank, and the banking industry-
as-a-whole.  You could click on any of these, or on the colored bands
connecting them, which bands represented the *relationships* between the
basic players.

Clicking on one of these screen-elements led down a level to a screen
that might depict, eg, the sequence of steps usually experienced in one
of the *relationships* (the Andersen-client relationship 'expanded' 
into Andersen-courts-client, client-communicates-need, Andersen-
proposes-solution, etc), or the internal structure of one of the 
players (the bank's organizational hierarchy, say).   Clicking on any 
part of one of these displays led to a 'themes' screen that sketched 
the most important themes that Tom's storytelling had pointed up, 
within that area.  This was the most ad-hoc design decision, and grew 
(partly) out of my insistence that the way to deal with large 
casebases is to write each storytopic on an indexcard, and sort them 
into piles!!!  So my cardpile categories became the themes under the 
subdivisions of the toplevel 'maps'.

It was these graphical-conceptual 'maps' that became the focus of
interest in the once-Tom-was-done project, a followup *tool* for
building generalized 'Ask systems'.  We did some really nuts-and-bolts
AI thinking at this point, about how to take any heap of stories, and
carve from it *with the aid of a software tool*, a system comparable to
Ask Tom.  One of my favorite generalizations from that period (to give
a taste of the level of abstraction we were trying to come to terms
with) was the idea of a 'sorting task' ...in the course of any sort of
intellectual-creative effort, there will be phases where what you're
doing is taking object X (and Y and Z) and looking at a row of buckets,
one or more of which you might want to drop it into.  A tool to make
this easier will always need a "???- try again later" bucket that
commits one to no particular bucket-assignment, and allows you to
reopen the matter later, for reconsideration.


[Next: the Universal Indexing Frame-- truly hairy and hardcore!]

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

also, I expect to repost the accumulated chapters, slightly edited, to
comp.ai in a few days, if you missed any.  There were comp.ai readers
who asked to see them, and couldn't access r.a.i-f.
