Despite the fact that “Semantic Web” has been trending down (at least in Google searches), it seems like more web sites devoted to it are popping up these days. I’ve been messing around with Twine for a fews weeks now and it seems pretty useful, although it definitely can’t accomplish what they claim. [^1] A new one that I stumbled into, via KurzweilAI.net is Powerset. My 30 second review is that I tried searches on two pretty obscure subjects that I’ve been reading about lately, the St. Petersburg factor[^2] and kriegsspiel. Basically, I got the same search results at wikipedia, powerset and google—no immediately discernible differences.

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I took a long sojourn into the history of interactive fiction (IF) with my launching pad being the stunning revelations unearthed by Andy Balo over at waxy in regards to the never-completed Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure sequel. But after reading that, and poking around the archives and playing a few great examples of IF, I started wondering why more hasn’t been done to advance the interface of these games? Why not incoporate more AI? Read more…