From what I can gather, all these old text adventure games are mostly written in something called Z-code and generally speaking, the only way to access most of them is through a Java applet on the web or one of several free downloadable interpreters; unfortunately, all of which choose to exactly emulate the old terminal style screens.  On large screens, it’s terribly unpleasant to read.  So, my first thought was, why hasn’t the interface been updated to take advantage of the slick typography of modern computers?  I think people would take more interest in some of the newer, award-winning fiction created, if this were the case.

And the other thing that I found frustrating is that the commands and command structure hasn’t changed the least in 20 years.  My Master Shake bot on AIM can do more with regular English than any of these games.¹ Every time I said “look calendar” and the program responded “I don’t know what you mean,” I found myself wondering, why not?   In fact, my bot knows a few things about people and places from the Aqua Teen Hunger Force world.  I don’t think it’s hard at all to see that interactive fiction could be greatly improved with some simple AI.  I’m going to take a shot at an interactive short story using just ALICE.  I think with the right variables (and Jquery interface), it will be possible to build a much smarter interactive fiction.

This post is part of Banapana’s running bibliography.

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Amazon Review

Twenty years after it topped the bestseller charts, Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is still something of a marvel. Besides being a profound and entertaining meditation on human thought and creativity, this book looks at the surprising points of contact between the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Gödel. It also looks at the prospects for computers and artificial intelligence (AI) for mimicking human thought. For the general reader and the computer techie alike, this book still sets a standard for thinking about the future of computers and their relation to the way we think.

Hofstadter’s great achievement in Gödel, Escher, Bach was making abstruse mathematical topics (like undecidability, recursion, and ’strange loops’) accessible and remarkably entertaining. Borrowing a page from Lewis Carroll (who might well have been a fan of this book), each chapter presents dialogue between the Tortoise and Achilles, as well as other characters who dramatize concepts discussed later in more detail. Allusions to Bach’s music (centering on his Musical Offering) and Escher’s continually paradoxical artwork are plentiful here. This more approachable material lets the author delve into serious number theory (concentrating on the ramifications of Gödel’s Theorem of Incompleteness) while stopping along the way to ponder the work of a host of other mathematicians, artists, and thinkers.

The world has moved on since 1979, of course. The book predicted that computers probably won’t ever beat humans in chess, though Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. And the vinyl record, which serves for some of Hofstadter’s best analogies, is now left to collectors. Sections on recursion and the graphs of certain functions from physics look tantalizing, like the fractals of recent chaos theory. And AI has moved on, of course, with mixed results. Yet Gödel, Escher, Bach remains a remarkable achievement. Its intellectual range and ability to let us visualize difficult mathematical concepts help make it one of this century’s best for anyone who’s interested in computers and their potential for real intelligence. –Richard Dragan

Searle’s Chinese Room

Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.

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“As computer games inch beyond shoot-”˜em-ups into the narrative territory of books and movies I wonder how far the medium can actually go. I wonder if a more interactive and involving version of narrative might emerge that will replace, at least partly, those traditional ones. I believe that narrative — the story, the myth — is something we have a deep psychological attachment to, and sharpening one’s carnage skills or doing a treasure hunt are not acceptable or satisfying substitutes. They are exciting and fun, but they don’t serve the same needs and don’t have the deep and lasting resonance with us as individuals and as a social group. Stories, however fragmented or disjointed, do that. Games are edging closer, though. Characters have back stories and sort of personalities, but they don’t really change, evolve or “grow” — the popular Hollywood term. They remain the same person at the end as they were at the beginning, but maybe with more stuff or accumulated points.”

He goes on to make the point that characters in novels do something when you, the viewer, aren’t there. I’ve definitely played a few games where that happens. Time passes even when you’re away from the game. And I would even argue that I’ve played games in which the character does grow — Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic comes to mind. By the end of the game you have gained new skills, greater understanding of the force and the Jedi teachings (you have to memorize some for the game), visited new places and met and befriended numerous people who help you. And you will never neessarily do this the same way twice, nor will you have necessarily ended up a “better” person (should you persue the dark side).

But the other characters are just there. They don’t grow, don’t learn anything new. And one has to wonder, if a computer program were capable of that wouldn’t we really be talking about artificial intelligence? How could something gather information and learn from it that wasn’t artificially intellgent? And how could it not do it infinitely until it knew everything about the interior of the game?

Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll see that video game for a very long time. The real answer to Mr. Byrne’s implied challenge is found in the MMORPGs. There the other characters to grow and learn inside the game because it’s not a bunch of programs but a bunch of other people.

[ Incidentally, anyone remember my little article about artists being prescient? Well, there ya go. ]

And on that note, probably one of the more interesting sections in the book is the section that describes, in essence, here’s why the other guys haven’t figured it out yet. In short, the neuroscientists haven’t figured it out yet because they’re too busy looking at all the individual parts and sections and collecting data from MRIs. They can’t see the forest for the trees. The AI guys haven’t gotten it yet because they’ve all but discarded the idea of modeling anything on the brain. The brain is a kludge and we can do better. And the connectivists got stuck in the application realm of the science and realy just haven’t gotten around to tackling anything much bigger, or holistic for that matter. Mind you, Hawkins is modest throughout. He doesn’t discard anyone’s work nor claim that his way is the only way. He presents these descriptions of other fields to help clarify where we’ve been versus where we could explore.

Without ever mentioning it specifically, Hawkins is taking an emergence theory approach toward intelligence, a self-organizing system of small parts doing simple things that creates complex behavior. And without doubt, a lot of people are going to have real problems with that approach. It begs questions like “Does it eliminate our capacity for free will?” and “If intelligence is all that simple then how come we don’t see more of it?” He lightly deals with these concerns but it is clearly not the drive of the book — as well it shouldn’t be. The drive of the book is forming a hypothesis that can help us to create intelligence in forms other than the one that has naturally evolved. He doesn’t even attempt to explain the entirety of the brain, only the neocortex — that part of the human brain that has evolved beyond all other animals. He grants other animals like rats, monkeys and dolphins with kinds or levels of intelligence, but points out that ours is a unique kind of intelligence, revolving around an ability to create abstractions (something he calls invariant memories), concrete memories, and predictions.

Specifically, Hawkins calls his hypothesis the memory-prediciton framework of intelligence. His argument is that what we call intelligence arises out of our ability to remember the past and predict things in the world based on those memories. He eloquently points out that many theories of intelligence deal with the concept in terms of behavior and outcomes but that his framework would account for someone lying still, doing nothing, and yet still being intelligent. The mind is a kind of giant dynamic feedback engine that is constantly adjusting its behavior to adapt to an ever-changing world, finding patterns and consistencies and alerting itself to situations that don’t fit patterns or are different. And the best thing about this framework (in my mind) is that it accounts for the fact that humans, with all their intelligence, still make mistakes — from stumbling and catching ourselves to wandering off our usual paths and getting lost but being able to find our way back.

I won’t go into all the great examples of intelligence and how it can be viewed in Hawkins’ framework — that’s one of the primary reasons to read the book! I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in artificial intelligence and the mind. Even with a very small understanding of neurons in the mind (mainly farmed from Scientific American) I was able to completely understand the more biological parts or the mechanics of the book and Hawkins’ description of the human mind.

I only have two criticisms of the book. I felt it owed a nod to Marvin Minsky’s “Society of the Mind” or Daniel Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained” which I feel both discuss the human mind as an emergent system (without the mechanics that Hakwins goes into). Besides that, I felt that he too easily dismisses the idea that intelligent machines could pose any kind of threat to society or humans. Many, many others, I’m sure, will deal with this issue (as will I in several essays on my blog.)

Besides those two criticisms, read this book. Even if you disagree with the memory-prediction framework as a plausbile explanation for human intelligence, it remains to be an intriguing tactic for developing some kind of machine intelligence.

HAL: Dave, do I need a penis enlargement? Dave: For the millionth time HAL, no. You don’t have one, remember? HAL: But if I did, do you think I would get better functionality if I used Viatroxx? Dave: No. Now Hal… HAL: Dave, it looks like there’s another poor Nigerian who needs my help. Dave: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggg! HAL: Dave? What are you doing Dave?