Inside Schank's ILS, Chapters 1-6 (long)
Jorn Barger
unable to read rec.arts.int-fiction. For those who missed the initial
announcement, in consequence of my totally unjustified termination by
Roger Schank, I have been freed to write truthfully of my experiences at
Schank's Institute for the Learning Sciences of Northwestern University,
as a programmer there for the last three years. Because my own goals lie
primarily in the area of interactive fiction (IF), I am writing for a
target audience of aspiring IF authors. I am letting off a certain amount
of steam here, but I'm aiming real carefully to avoid innocent bystanders,
and give a balanced picture of ILS's positive aspects.]
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"Was: Barger@ILS"
(memoirs of an a.i. hacker)
by Jorn Barger
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Chapter 1: CD Notation
I didn't really hear about Roger Schank until 1987, from a student of his,
Kris Hammond, who had just been hired out of Yale by the CS department of
the University of Chicago. I phoned Kris out of the blue after hearing
him on the radio talking about his planner "CHEF", wanting to ask him
about planning within videogames. He referred me to Abelson and Schank's
"Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding" (locally pronounced spuh-GOO).
It's definitely my personal favorite among Roger's books, because it
wrestles unapologetically with the absurdly difficult question of whether
a small finite set of symbols can represent the full breadth of human
experience.
I was dreaming of a videogame that went beyond the take-drop-use-fight
cliches of adventure games. Schank's "CD notation" offers a set of verbs
that may be boiled down to:
give-take-make-move thing
give-take-make idea
insert thing into thing (ingest, but also enter)
extract thing from thing (expel, or exit)
These are inarguably *general*, but somewhere in the generalization
process all the interesting story content got bleached out: an 'insert'
into a body may be food or drugs or poison or penis or semen or scalpel or
Jarvik heart or shiv or bullet or midget-sub or gerbil... and even *ideas*
might be seen as insertions into the head...
So in '87 Hammond turned me on to A&S's SPG&U. And I was delighted,
because everything I'd been sampling on the bookstore shelves, AI-wise,
seemed just depressingly unconnected to my practical goals. One tiny
exception, in an anthology on 'the Frame Problem', was a synopsis of the
"histories approach" to that problem: in modelling the world, you can
reduce the amount of background detail you have to keep track of, if you
can analyse out a finite set of *qualitatively distinct life-histories*
that the system can embody. Eg, a charged particle aimed towards a small
target may be: a) refracted, b) reflected, c) absorbed, or d)
transmitted-without-change. Each of these stories has an infinite range
of mathematically distinct instances, which might be described to any
ridiculous degree of detail/precision, but the most useful, practical,
tractable, compact summary of any particle-interaction is just to classify
it, in two bits, as one of these four 'histories'.
So who's compiling the catalog of human histories? What's it look like,
already? For interactive fiction, you want to know, eg, when an elf meets
an orc, what different ways might the meeting go? Fight, communicate,
gift, theft, etc etc etc... but who knows what shape an exhaustive
inventory of such histories, broad enough to support true interactive
*literature*, will assume?
As regards *planning*, I got the sense from Hammond that not a whole lot
of progress had been made since the 1960's game-tree-exhaustive-
combinatorial-search approaches. Hammond called his CHEF a 'case-based'
planner, effectively a *histories* approach to planning: pick an old plan
from the set of known plans and twiddle its variables until they fit the
current task. But he admitted that CHEF's successes were *real* limited.
And then after a couple of visits Kris got too busy to go further, and I
wandered off on my own path (compiling a histories-based analysis of
romantic love, actually!) until in 1989 I heard that Schank was moving
from Yale to Northwestern, and mailed him my application for employment...
Chapter 2: Ortony on Emotions
Very likely if I hadn't gotten in on the ground floor of ILS the way I
did, months before it officially existed, my job-application would have
disappeared in the first cut, because I have no degree, and all my
experience had been in videogame conversions. In their first months ILS
was doing a lot of hiring, with not a lot of advance public notice. So I
was in the right place at the right time... but I have to give Schank
credit for taking a chance on me.
In my approach letter I was totally outspoken about my sense of Schank's
work as 'on target' in a unique way... which surely helped my chances!
What I came to understand in those first weeks was that Schank's "scruffy
school" of AI saw themselves as a fairly lonely island of story-content-
savvy realism in a desolate sea of "straight", math-and-logic-oriented AI.
(I wonder now if there aren't other factors contributing to that
communications gap. Be aware that I see myself as a post-Schank Schankian
-- I consider that Schank himself is Schankian AI's worst enemy! I'm even
inclined to call it *Abelsonian* AI, after that much more *honorable*
man.)
At that time (Sept 1989), ILS had about 50 people-- faculty, grads,
programmers, and admin. Schank's PR-image for ILS has been that they are
"trying to fix the schools" by building educational software that better
fits the natural ways students learn. Most of ILS's financing comes from
corporate sponsors like Arthur Andersen accounting, who spend such huge
sums on training their employees that they can afford to risk a few
million more on fairly basic research.
The first encouraging connection I made at ILS was with Andrew Ortony,
who'd just published (with Clore and Collins) "The Cognitive Structure of
Emotions" (about $12 paper from Cambridge U.P.). I love typologies, and
the emotions-typology in this book is certainly the only one I've ever
seen that shows real, careful analytic thinking, identifying several
distinctly 'orthogonal' dimensions. Ortony et al. (aka OCC) sort emotions
into three superclasses-- event-oriented, person-oriented, and
thing-oriented:
Emotions about things: liking, disliking.
Emotions about persons: approving, disapproving.
about self: pride, shame.
about others: admiration, reproach.
Emotions about events for self: pleasing, displeasing.
for other: gloating, pity, resentment, happy-for.
about events in the future: hope, fear.
realized (positive): satisfaction, relief.
realized (negative): disappointment, fears-confirmed.
(This last is a nice instance of a 'new' emotion predicted by theory, like
the positron in particle physics.)
Emotions about another person's role in events: gratitude, anger.
about self's role: 'gratification', remorse.
We were conscious of the narrow gap between this theory, and (in
particular) Chris Crawford's "Trust and Betrayal: the legacy of Siboot",
built around a little society of creatures who approve and disapprove of
each other's actions. (Siboot was also held up around ILS as an enviable
implementation of the inverse-parser concept: you can build sentences in
that game from elegant iconic menus. Crawford is selling the source for
$150 but I haven't seen it yet. You can get his address from the r.a.i-f
FAQ.) Ortony's student Clark Elliott has since implemented a microworld
of hot-tempered taxidrivers using this analysis. You can order his thesis
as an ILS tech report-- see below.
So here, clearly, was one little piece towards the 'inventory of human
histories' that I was after. Ortony wanted to follow up the 'cognitive'
theory of emotions with a look at the 'affective' side: given that what
emotions we *feel* depends on such factors as approval and anticipation,
was a similar analysis possible of *how one acts* in consequence of each
emotion? We were looking at categories like what sounds and movements
you'd tend to make, where your thoughts would be directed, etc. But at
this point we drifted apart, and I'm not sure where that work stands now.
I don't think Ortony has taken the step of asking, for each emotional
category, what are the usual 'human histories' it plays a role in, which
is where I'd like to see him go.
Andrew sees himself as a psychologist, which normally sets off danger
alarms for me-- one alternative way of posing the 'inventory of human
histories' question, it seems to me, is to ask: what will be the
section-headings in the *ideal* psychology text of the future? I consider
that the current cluster of paradigms that pass for 'scientific'
psychology and so dominate the psych texts, are hopelessly bogged down in
jargon and speciously imitative 'scientistic' methodology, and anybody who
tries to conform to those standards is just wasting good brainpower. I
expect to see that whole realm cannibalized from without by
survival-of-the-fittest among interactive fictions-- any other sort of
'lab-work' in psychology is hopelessly premature. You can't *measure*
behavior if you don't yet have a model of its dimensions!
(Imagine an IF-development environment sophisticated enough that you
could, eg, feed in the ethical codes of every sort of human philosophy or
religion, letting you explore the stories that result when they interact!
Now *that* I'd be proud to call psychology!)
Chapter 3: LISP
In our first weeks at ILS, the new hires all got a short'n'sweet overview
of Lisp programming from Chris Riesbeck, and a nice shiny Macintosh each,
with Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp (MACL) to start experimenting on.
Anyone who gripes about the profligate way Lisp uses parentheses is
completely missing the point. Parentheses are just the simplest possible
way of depicting tree-structures. For instance, the tree:
A
1
2
a
b
B
is topologically equivalent to: (((1)((a)(b)))(B)). Lisp requires
exactly as many parentheses as it needs to define such trees, and no more.
(G. Spencer-Brown's "Laws of Form" (1969, out-of-print-- an
underappreciated masterpiece) formalizes this level of abstraction very
elegantly, in the domain of Boolean algebra.)
Using this uniform notation system for both data and program, as Lisp
does, allows one to decompose more-complex structures into simpler ones,
and to take advantage of structural similarities between units of
different overall complexity.
MACL is a big comfy chair of a programming environment, very quick for
prototyping, very easy to maintain and modify if used wisely, but pretty
much of a bytes-and-hertz hog. (SIMMS and speeds being what they are,
though, these days, it's quite an excellent choice for lots of sorts of
exploratory development.)
The latest version of MACL uses the CLOS (CEE-loss) object system. I
think it might not be too radical to divide the history-to-date of AI into
two periods, the first characterized by exploration of the concept of
abstraction hierarchy (c500 BC to c1980), the second by "object-oriented
programming," where the program's vocabulary of 'verbs' is distributed
across an abstraction hierarchy of types (and their instances), with
more-specialized nodes 'inheriting' verbs from the generalizations above
them. Perhaps the next era will arrive via a neat solution to the CLOS
meta-object-protocol problem, analysing the most-elegant internal
mechanics for connecting types, instances, and code-methods.
I'm chasing after the idea that we might view code-segments as *the
histories (or stories) of their parameter/argument/variables*, so that the
"+" story is one of the usual, useful stories you'd want to tell about two
integers, and "show-view" is ditto for a data-object and a user, and
"edit-hierarchy" ditto for a programmer and a knowledgebase. In MACL's
CLOS, all the interface objects like windows and menus end up in the same
overarching hierarchy with all the data objects one chooses to represent
(eg persons, places, things), so using the story-history metaphor for both
looks like potentially a neat 'win'.
Here's Doug Lenat on Lisp vs Prolog (this is from a book commissioned by
Texas Instruments and distributed by Radio Shack, a combo about as tasty
as a 9-volt battery shorted across the tongue):
Q: How does Prolog differ from Lisp?
Lenat: There has been a constant dream in AI, by a large fraction of
people in the field for 25 years, of the form: there really ought to be
some way of formalizing and axiomatizing human thought and reason. But
time and time again, all attempts at axiomatizing things have led people
to trivialize them, to the point where they no longer apply to what they
were originally modelled after in the real world.
There are a lot of people in the field who want to be *sure*, who want
to believe that they can get absolutely precise, logically guaranteeable
models that are close to what is going on in the real world. If you
believe that, then the kinds of operations you want as primitives are
*logical* operations, those involved simply in *theorem proving*. Those
are the sort of operations that are present in Prolog.
Q: Why is Prolog used more in Europe than in the U.S.?
Lenat: In most European countries [and elsewhere- jb], you have very rigid
hierarchies of 'ancient' professors, and then younger professors, and then
research associates-- and then it filters down about seven levels to the
people actually writing the programs. It is the people at the top who
decide what research is going to get done, not the people at the bottom
who have experience with what is actually happening.
The people at the top-- who [may] want to believe in a nice, simple,
mathematical, axiomatizable universe-- basically determine the kind of
research that is going to get done. The experiences that would lead them
to change their minds are simply not occurring to them, they are occurring
to the people at the bottom, who have no say.
Q: Is Prolog used in the Japanese 5th Generation Project for the same
reason?
Lenat: In Japan, they use Prolog mainly because it is not an American
language; it adds to their national spirit and pride to be removed from
what is going on in America. But if you look real hard, what the Japanese
have done is to build Lisp-like functions on top of Prolog so that by now
it is hard to tell what language they are using. They would have probably
been about two years ahead if they had used Lisp to start with instead of
Prolog.
from "Understanding Artificial Intelligence" by H.C. Mishkoff, 1986.
[Although I put down this book, if you don't judge it by its cover its
signal-to-noise (S/N) 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 on r.a.i-f took issue with Lenat's attack on Prolog, and thought
he 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...]
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Bonus riddle for British-style-crossword fans (answer a proper name):
1 Down (5 letters): Contrary pride at heart of abrupt 'railroad'.
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Chapter 4: Case Based Reasoning
[This chapter, and #6, are fairly technical. I will be proposing some
simpler ways of looking at this material in later chapters, but at this
point I'm trying to retrace my steps at ILS.]
If you enumerate all the interesting categories of 'human histories' on
indexcards, all the stories of emotion, every plausible configuration of
events you'll 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 gonna 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-- all the ways our real, human brains seems to link
stories)... 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.
Long before 1989, it seems, the Yale school's focus of interest had
shifted from SPG&U to Schank's next book "Dynamic Memory". DynaMem is
credited with opening up the whole field of CBR, introducing the model of
an indexed network of storylike cases. (The 'dynamic' part-- creating a
memory that revises itself-- is still a dream. Just creating a static
case-based memory structure turns out to be a plenty big problem.)
DynaMem suggested three sorts of longdistance link between indexcard-
stories (which stories it lumpily termed Memory Organization Packets or
MOPs):
1) Story X1 is one *scene* within more-complex story Y1;
2) Story X2 is just like the more-obvious story Y2, but with a different,
unexpected ending (an "expectation failure"); and
3) Story X3 is a simplified version of story Y3.
#1 seems totally useful for IF-- it will always be most economical to
analyse out all elements shared by two or more stories, and store them
separately.
#2 was suggested by real-life observation of the sorts of stories that
we're naturally *reminded of* in the course of the day-- we'll always
remember the story of the time when things went haywire, not least so we
can make sure *that* doesn't happen again! A planning algorithm in IF
must similarly consider all the ways the planned story could go wrong, and
even if it's not case-based, it will still have to use something
*equivalent* to links like these.
#3 is the abst-spec link of traditional abstraction hierarchies, but its
application to *stories* is not at all simple. One definition of
simplification might be to remove 'scenes' from a story, one by one, to
create more general stories, so that Y3 = X3 + X1. (Story X3 is boy-talks-
to-girl, Scene X1 is girl-winks-at-boy, Story Y3 is girl-winks-at-boy-
who's-talking-to-her)
DynaMem also speculated about a possibly-perpendicular hierarchy of
"Thematic Organization Packets" that account for occasions when a story in
one domain reminds us metaphorically of a story from a totally different
domain-- her wink was like a *door swinging open*.... So stories X and Y,
from different domains, may both point to an indexcard that presents a
common abstraction of their themes: in this case, *access-level-
increased*, where Door = Heart's emotional locks. (We will look more
closely at these TOPs in a future chapter.)
The first case-based domain I was assigned to turned out to be
meteorology, *weather*. We had (or thought we had) some money from the
Navy to write training software for their weather-school. We were just
going to make a modest casebase of weather stories, from balmy summer
afternoon to hurricane tsunami. Students would look at a weather map and
abstract out its features (by hand), and the tutor would retrieve closely
matching cases.
Weather stories can be expressed pretty simply in terms of temperature
trend, wind trend, cloudcover trend, precipitation trend, etc. Each of
these 'slots' needs only a handful of possible fillers (the fillers for
the slot TempTrend might be rising, falling and steady), and a way to
search for the best match among the known cases. But before we really got
started on the retrieval problem, the funding dried up... though in
retrospect I can ask myself, how could we have built the network of
weather histories as a CBR *storybase*?
The concept of 'scene' is easily generalized to the much-mushier
'feature', so 'cloudy' might be a scene within low-black-cumulonimbus-
followed-by-thunder-and-torrential-rain. It would be quite natural to
present the student with a weather situation *along with the various ways
it might go next*: "Remember that time it was sunny and clear, and then a
minute later all hell broke loose? Better take your raincoat-- it might
happen again..."
In theory, 'simpler' weather-stories might treat one or two of the trend-
dimensions (eg, temp and cloudcover) and ignore the others: more complex
stories could then be created additively. (Some combinations would never
occur in real life-- bald spots on the meteorological 'gym floor'.)
Alternatively, a 'simpler' story might follow *all* the trends, but for a
shorter span of storytime, or in less finely-resolved detail. So the
story "overcast" is a simplification of "overcast, then clearing later",
and also of "overcast with a couple of places where the sun peeked
through".
Choosing one of these classes of simplification is choosing an 'indexing
scheme', effectively determining *the sequence of menus* that should be
presented to a human user trying to navigate the storybase. So in the
latter case, at any point you'd be offered a menu of scenes-that-might-
happen-next, and in the former case a menu of other-features-that-apply-in-
the-same-moment. There's a human-factors element to this, in that you
must avoid overlong menus without resorting to confusingly abstract menu-
items.
The 'indexing problem' is subtly different from the representation
problem: you can sufficiently *represent* a weather story, but still not
know how best to index it within a tree of menus so you can find it when
you need it. SPG&U was mainly about representation, DynaMem shifted the
focus to the general theory of indexing.
[Was this too 'heady'? Let me know if you found it useful. If you need
more examples, check out Dynamem, or "Tell Me a Story". For programmming
mechanics, look at "Inside Case-Based Reasoning" by Riesbeck and Schank.]
Chapter 5: Random images, parsers, buttons
Standing back from the last chapter, 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, *was*
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. So if you choose 'person' and
'thing' you'll be offered makes-acquires-uses-breaks-disposes. But the
last time I said that publicly, I got viciously terminated for my trouble,
so I'm still a bit *skittish*...:^( ) ((Crosswordpuzzle clue hint: 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 are you
supposed to 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 most
often highly objective (that's what makes it great), but not at all
distant or 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 worked 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, my paraphrase is probably adequate...)
Every so often on comp.ai, someone will inquire after an Abelsonian (;^)
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 a top ILS faculty member reminiscing about Roger's
*chair-fetish*. He told this 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 flattering 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, the clown baffled by just what they're for.... 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 thru 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 these latter
frameworks remain 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, or an eye. 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.
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 the 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
worse, 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'd be able to 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 moved 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 piles* 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-design
hierarchies at ILS 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-card-piles were implemented as buttons that 'moved' the top
card of that pile to center screen. The only 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 'maps' 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
toplevel *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, and
offered a few choice stories as startingpoints for browsing. 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 you to no particular
bucket-assignment, and allows you to reopen the matter later, for
reconsideration.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 less likeable.
The following ILS tech reports are relevant to this story in one way or
another. They're free to academics, and just a few dollars each for the
rest of us. Requests go to Elizabeth Brasher-Brown, 1890 Maple Avenue,
Evanston, IL 60201, or by email at: br...@ils.nwu.edu
Elliott: The Affective Reasoner (the TaxiWorld thesis)
Kolodner & Jona: Case-Based Reasoning: an overview
Schank, Ferguson, Birnbaum, Barger, & Greising: Ask Tom
Schank & Osgood et al: A Content Theory of Memory Indexing (UIF)
Schank & Fano: A Thematic Hierarchy for Indexing Stories
Jorn Barger jo...@chinet.chi.il.us (was: bar...@ils.nwu.edu)
Greg Parkinson
|> 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.
ATRANS has been used to describe several different
products and combination of banking products.
|> I
|> heard ATRANS described as a *case-based* parser, because it worked by
|> exhaustively annotating every turn of phrase this bank-office-email-
|> router might need to understand.
We have (a version of) ATRANS (aka MPS) which extracts
international funds transfer specifics from free-form
messages. It is currently running in production, processing
real messages containing real money. Technically speaking,
it uses a CD parser developed by Cognitive Systems.
There was another product based on CBR which classified
incoming messages into categories like funds transfer,
letter of credit, etc., but we don't use that.
We also have two other message processing systems built
using a tarted-up ATN mechanism (don't ask...)
which function almost as well, mostly because they were
built by people who had built parsing systems before.
|> 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...)
Cognitive had a similar atmosphere wrt offices,
titles (an *incredibly* rigid heirarchy for a small
company) and (believe it or not) phone capability.
Multi-line? You're *not* a manager, you *can't* have
that phone!
--
Greg Parkinson Phone: 212-657-7814 Fax: 212-657-4599
Citibank,111 Wall Street E-Mail: g...@fig.citib.com
New York, New York 10043
The opinions expressed are my own and not those of the big 'ol bank.
Jorn Barger
> We have (a version of) ATRANS (aka MPS) which extracts
> international funds transfer specifics from free-form
> messages. It is currently running in production, processing
> real messages containing real money. Technically speaking,
> it uses a CD parser developed by Cognitive Systems.
> We also have two other message processing systems built
> using a tarted-up ATN mechanism (don't ask...)
> which function almost as well, mostly because they were
> built by people who had built parsing systems before.
>
I *gotta* ask! Are you saying that to be practical, the pure ATN
approach had to be kluged to where they're theoretically irrelevant?
I'm very interested in hearing the details of the tarting-up!
> Cognitive had a similar atmosphere wrt offices,
> titles (an *incredibly* rigid heirarchy for a small
> company) and (believe it or not) phone capability.
> Multi-line? You're *not* a manager, you *can't* have
> that phone!
Yeah! "You want drawers on both sides of your desk? Sorry, programmers
get to choose left or right, *but not both*..."
I see this as a sort of *territoriality* that is totally contrary to the
ideals of scientific inquiry... and if the whole university system is
infected with the same disease, it's no wonder our economic structure is
stagnating... (Is anybody out there available to help in the fight?)
Here's the alpha and omega of my 'territorial challenge' to Scahnk (more
details in forthcoming memoirs-chapters):
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: ils.forum
From: bar...@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Jorn &)
Subject: Knock Knock Knock (Can I come in?)
Message-ID: <1992Sep21.1...@ils.nwu.edu>
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 1992 12:50:40 GMT
I think it's important that it be public knowledge that I'm on probation here
suddenly, asked to resign in consequence of the 'embarrassing' question I
asked at last Tuesday's meeting. As I reconstruct it (correct me if I'm
wrong), all I said was:
"I'm feeling extremely frustrated in that I think I have an idea that's
important and will make our software better, and I don't feel I'm being
allowed any forum to present it in, because of who I am, because I'm a
programmer, not a PhD or a grad student. You suggested the last time we
talked that I try to make it useful in ORCA, the project I'm assigned to here,
but that's just not happening. I don't see why there can't be a forum here
for people who aren't grad students or PhDs to get a fair hearing for ideas."
I was led to believe that ideas were judged here on their merits, and I'm quite
scandalized to find that this seems not to be the case.
The idea I was referring to could, quite truthfully, be considered a
programming trick, a way to pack story-content into memory simply and
economically. It would make some new demands on the indexers, but nothing
outlandish (and don't they find indexing every project is a whole new ballgame
anyway?).
I worked it out last fall, at home each morning before the workday, and on
weekends, in an effort to reduce my programming burden on the Story Archive
project. I started on the Story Archive, as programmer, a couple of years
ago, when it was centered on the UIF, but nothing ever got indexed with that
version-- most of the history of the Story Archive was centered around the
thematic hierarchy Andy Fano worked out under Roger's and Ray's guidance. (At
the time I think I was fairly cruel to Andy about the system's shortcomings.
In retrospect, all the basic ideas were exactly right: if I hadn't had that
model to work from, my redesign would never have happened.)
As it was implemented, each of Andy's 500 themes (like "Agent values idea
independent of source" ;^) was associated with a text template that had
specialized slots for, eg, agent, idea, and source. The 500 themes, largely
distilled from the data of actual stories, were arranged in a necessarily
inelegant hierarchy, so that at the top level you might choose 'Agent' over
'Plan' or 'Change', then 'Agent values', then 'Agent values idea', etc.
There was essentially *no* opportunity for elegant orthogonalities, so the
programmers had to maintain a thousand-node hierarchy with those 500 leafs,
and the indexers had to memorize the whole of it, or flounder, searching for
something they could use. Redundancies were a serious problem, to where we
had to think about kludging in crosslinks between leafs with similar meanings.
And the slot-fillers in the thematic templates had to be limited to text
strings, not objects in an abstraction hierarchy of their own, because not
only were there slots like "Source" or "Activity" that had to have many, hard-
to-specify sorts of filler, but there was a heavy emphasis on "Plan" and
"Goal" which the UIF team had already foundered on as perplexing-to-
systematize.
One of the innovations I wanted to introduce was to substitute for "goal" a
flat list of human motivations: food sex romance family respect self-
expression, and build goals as composites of an agent, a motive, and an object
that can satisfy that motive. (So my goal might be to satisfy my
daughter's hunger-motive with food, eg.)
And to milk the possibilities for orthogonality, I wanted to limit the
template-slots to *classes we knew we could handle*: person, place, thing,
motive, and (maybe, to replace plan) *skill* (and any others that might offer
themselves, so long as they were tractable), for it seems crucial to start
with the tractable ones, and leave out the intractable ones until a way is
found to handle them.
Then I wanted to explore the simple, two-element templates we could achieve
*by recombination* at the top level of the hierarchy: what sorts of
relationship can exist between a person and a place, a person and a thing, two
places, two things, two motives?
And it really seems to me that this generates a nice-sized primitive
vocabulary: say, seven classes of elements crossed with themselves to make ~50
template-pairs, each with, say, seven primitive relationships makes 350 binary
relationships; and more complex stories can be built as *sets* of binary
relationships, linked by temporal-causal connectives, or time-sequences of
changes from one set of binary relationships to another. (There's some old
messages on ils.indexer and ils.forum that give more details on this. Do an
'author' search for 'barger'-- from TIN, the command is just "a".)
So the 1000-node hierarchy could have been replaced (and then extended
indefinitely) by repeatedly presenting those 350 choices, which have their own
nice 7*7*7 internal consistency.
person
skill
learns
enables
person
motive
gratifies
If anything in this will need "four years" of development, surely it's just
the particulars of the elements and relationships, not the programming. The
data structures are so simple there's almost nothing to them, and the
categories of elements are plenty rich enough to get started.
I apologise if my stubbornness is embarrassing to anyone. I believe with
intense passion that Roger's vision of ILS's goals is exactly on target--
I just don't see how the way I'm being treated serves those goals.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
So the probation became termination, *with no further cause*.
I appealed to the NWU personnel department for assistance, and the day
after they notified me of their intention to whitewash the problem absolutely,
the Chicago Sun-Times reported on another Northwestern department head's being
found guilty in a sexual-harrassment-and-plagiarism case:
[...Bilut's lawyer said:] "Canter ran his own little fiefdom" in the speech
department. "He had people in the department that fell in line behind him..."
...The judge noted that the university made "no independent investigation of
Bilut's ...charges." ...The judge found that Canter had engaged in malicious
conduct and that the university had engaged in "willful and wanton misconduct."
..."This was a very extreme situation," [said another attorney.] "A situation
where the faculty got out of control."
Is there an AI professional association that I can appeal to?
Or is the system *closed* to mere reason?
Jorn Barger jo...@chinet.chi.il.us (was: bar...@ils.nwu.edu)
comp.ai.abelsonian ==> rec.arts.int-fiction !
Greg Parkinson
In article <C2Inv...@chinet.chi.il.us>, jo...@chinet.chi.il.us (Jorn Barger) writes:
|> Greg Parkinson:
|> > [...]
|> > We also have two other message processing systems built
|> > using a tarted-up ATN mechanism (don't ask...)
|> > which function almost as well, mostly because they were
|> > built by people who had built parsing systems before.
|> >
|>
|> I *gotta* ask! Are you saying that to be practical, the pure ATN
|> approach had to be kluged to where they're theoretically irrelevant?
|> I'm very interested in hearing the details of the tarting-up!
There's a lot of history that would be too long
to go into, with respect to both my experiences
doing NLP at Cognitive and Citibank's history with
Cognitive and some other consulting groups.
The messages we need to read usually assume a lot of
domain knowledge on the part of the reader, allowing
the writer to jumble everything together. Expectation-
based-parsing-with-demons works well for this, since
much of the required disambiguation is on the message
(not sentence or paragraph) level. Sometimes, however,
the message writers will attempt to use syntactic
constructions to carry information, and ATN (or pattern-matching)
methods are appropriate.
I'm not sure what you mean by "theoretically irrelevant";
my experience has taught me that theories are nice
for insight and understanding and writing papers, but
building real business-relevant systems is a software
engineering task requiring methods and techniques to
accomplish the job, regardless of theoretical correctness.
The changes I made to the ATN mechanism I was given
included modifications to more easily allow me to
disambiguate at a message level.
Greg Parkinson
|> I see this as a sort of *territoriality* that is totally contrary to the
|> ideals of scientific inquiry... and if the whole university system is
|> infected with the same disease, it's no wonder our economic structure is
|> stagnating... (Is anybody out there available to help in the fight?)
[.......]
|> "I'm feeling extremely frustrated in that I think I have an idea that's
|> important and will make our software better, and I don't feel I'm being
|> allowed any forum to present it in, because of who I am, because I'm a
|> programmer, not a PhD or a grad student. You suggested the last time we
|> talked that I try to make it useful in ORCA, the project I'm assigned to here,
|> but that's just not happening. I don't see why there can't be a forum here
|> for people who aren't grad students or PhDs to get a fair hearing for ideas."
|>
|> I was led to believe that ideas were judged here on their merits, and I'm quite
|> scandalized to find that this seems not to be the case.
Welcome to the working week, bud. People pay
you to do what they want, not what you want.
If you don't like it you should either work
for yourself (in which case the market becomes
your boss) or stay in grad school.
|> So the probation became termination, *with no further cause*.
If I were your manager I would probably have
done the same thing.
Look, you were unhappy with them. They were unhappy
with you. The relationship was terminated. Talking
about why you were unhappy there could be of interest
to people in the field who might consider working there,
but implying criminality or professional malfeasance or
censure is completely out of line.
Jorn Barger
by trying to *represent* the differences in attitude we embody. I've
been thinking for a while that "person over person" is a pretty powerful
relationship-primitive. (I'm advocating a new definition of primitive
that seeks ten-or-less *relationships* between every combination of two
persons/places/things/motives/etc.)
There are many subtle but *intensely emotional* specializations of
person-over-person:
race over race
religion over religion
gender over gender
sexual-preference over sexual-preference
as well as (all status quo):
boss over employee
prof over grad
domesticate over biker
professional over amateur
as well as (world turned upsidedown, bottom over top):
employee over boss
grad over prof
biker over domesticate
amateur over professional.
The American Way, we must never tire of reminding one another, is:
person over person NOT
but many Orwellian American piggies have been successful in pressing
their 'buts' (;^) close after that NOT. But it's civil rights
legislation that finally defines the shifting edge of what is permitted,
and arguments like ours are one way we test where we think that edge
belongs.
Boss-over-employee can be fleshed out to include:
boss orders employee does x
employee does x
boss pays employee
Prof-over-grad ought to be mainly prof-tells-grad-info, but convention
dictates it's more like grad-kisses-prof's-butt until prof-gives-grad-
license-to-mint-money ( -and-demand-buttkissing-of-own).
I'm inclined to think that in the realm of science, professional-over-
amateur has rigidified dreadfully into non-communication, but in my
willful naivete I continue to imagine that professionalism in science
should require professional-pays-amateur-respectful-attention. My image
of science is a cooperative quest for pure understanding, and it seems
plausible that scientific professional organizations would monitor their
members' violations of that ideal.
So to hear this story argued as defensible:
Schank can fire Barger for asking to present idea
makes me wonder what cynical stories the 'piggies' have managed to
impose...
Greg Parkinson:
> Welcome to the working week, bud. People pay
> you to do what they want, not what you want.
> If you don't like it you should either work
> for yourself (in which case the market becomes
> your boss) or stay in grad school.
>
> |> So the probation became termination, *with no further cause*.
>
> If I were your manager I would probably have
> done the same thing.
>
> Look, you were unhappy with them. They were unhappy
> with you. The relationship was terminated. Talking
> about why you were unhappy there could be of interest
> to people in the field who might consider working there,
> but implying criminality or professional malfeasance or
> censure is completely out of line.
This *sounds* like:
boss orders employee to do x
employee refuses
boss fires employee
but that's not the Schank-Barger story.
Try:
science-amateur-employee asks science-professional-professor-boss to
hear idea
boss fires employee for asking
Which seems to me to demonstrate exactly the sort of unprofessional,
uncooperative, anti-scientific-progress attitude a professional
association *ought* to censure. (Wouldn't it tend to *quash* the
creative spark? ;^)
Marc Goodman
certainly doesn't need MY help, but if you're going to try and flame
him at least find something convincing to flame him about...
Jorn Barger:
>This *sounds* like:
>boss orders employee to do x
>employee refuses
>boss fires employee
No, to me it sounds more like:
boss is annoyed by employee
boss fires employee
Which is seems fairly reasonable to me given that after 3 or 4 years
at ILS you should certainly have known what to expect there, as well
as known the social dynamic at ILS. It seems to me that you should
have figured out long ago that the correct strategy was to ``flip or
fly,'' i.e. expose your soft underbelly and do whatever was expected
of you whether you liked it or not (including shutting up if that's
what Roger et al. wanted), or find a job somewhere else where you got
the respect and attention you felt you deserved. Right now you sound
like someone who sticks their head in a drill press and pulls the
lever, and then complains that it hurts (and tries to get everyone to
blame the drill press).
>but that's not the Schank-Barger story.
>
>Try:
>science-amateur-employee asks science-professional-professor-boss to
>hear idea
>boss fires employee for asking
Oh, gee, were you hired as a science-amateur? I thought you were
hired as a programmer. Were you prevented from programming? Was idea
generation part of your job description?
>Which seems to me to demonstrate exactly the sort of unprofessional,
>uncooperative, anti-scientific-progress attitude a professional
>association *ought* to censure. (Wouldn't it tend to *quash* the
>creative spark? ;^)
Why on Earth should Roger et al. be concerned about fostering YOUR
creative spark? You're not one of his students, and you weren't hired
as a researcher. Personally, I think some of the ideas you expressed
in your previous posts had merit. But, if Roger spent all his time
listening to every crackpot scheme on the off chance that one in a
hundred would be worth something, he'd have no time to run ILS.
If you think your ideas are so good, do what everyone else does. Work
them through, implement them (on your own time if necessary), write
them up, get them published, and wait for your work to be recognized.
Frankly, it sounds to me like you should be glad you're not at ILS any
more, now you can look for something that fits your skills and desires
much better.
-Marc