[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD Design doc (long)

[Nathan F Yospe]

On Tue, 22 Dec 1998, T. Alexander Popiel wrote:

:In message:  <Pine.GSO.3.96.981219175050.4616B-100000 at uhunix2>
:             Nathan F Yospe <yospe at hawaii.edu> writes:

I'm sending this back on-list...

:>Which rarely helps the illusion. The flaw, IMO, lies in the treatment of
:>verbs. If a verb exists, it should exist universally, if you intend some
:>form of global consistancy to be an objective. Returned messages must be
:>generated by the verb, as above, but they should also be sensitive to an
:>environmental failure...

:Really?  I'd want 'draw' to mean two quite different things when
:used with a sword or with a grease pencil.  How do you make this
:a universal verb without severe warts?  (Of course, this could
:be used as a situation where global consistency is not the goal.)

No, it's perfectly usable with global consistancy. I use probability and
possibility to resolve these issues at interpretation. The X most likely
interpretations (where X is simply the number that survived discard) get
compared for situational likelyhood... to illustrate:

   Case: Man with history indicating knowledge of guns and art, but with
         no pencil, and unarmed... no history of cardplaying

   > draw sixgun
   You reach for your sixgun, and find yourself unarmed.

   > draw
   You glance around for a writing instrument, but fail to find one.

   Case: Armed cardshark, no threat

   > draw
   You draw a jack of hearts.

   Case: Armed cardshark, high temper, losing

   > draw
   You pull your sixgun.

   (draw does not initiate shooting)

   Case: Pacifist artist with no card skills in a tavern, surrounded and
         under attack by armed thugs

   > draw
   You pull out your pad and charcoal and nervously begin sketching.

I found the following synonyms* for "draw" in my database:
Synonym				Correlation	Familiarity
Sketch				96		90
Take <weapon> [holder]		70		45
Take <card>			60		40
Take <object> [container]	22		40

Correlations less than 20 won't show on query, though if there is a gain
in correlation during training, other synonyms may appear... Note that a
given character file on a client will inevitably develop correlation and
familiarity for each verb (and noun, etc) far different from the base. A
given character file may well have a correlation of 99 (max) for drawing
a weapon, and only 40 for sketching something. There are also couples of
synonyms for draw... "draw <fluid>", for example. That last one, with 22
correlation, has correlation 89 for "draw <object> [container]". Most of
these synonyms were extracted from an electronic thesaurus file, but I'm
always adding new ones...

*synonym actually means highest correlation textual synonym for whatever
token-concept the original synonym search pulled up. The database search
drew four large numbers. Each number was linked to an ordered word list,
the first word of which claimed the highest correlation and familiarity.
(Currenlty, I just use the product of the two factors... I still think I
should be able to come up with a better algorithm.)

There you go, people... a little more info on the inner workings of that
client I'm always talking about... next time, maybe I'll explain how the
training net operates on the two databases each time there is a query to
the interpreter... and after that, perhaps I'll talk about the server or
the network coordination scheme...
--

Nathan F. Yospe - Born in the year of the tiger, riding it forever after
University of Hawaii at Manoa, Dept of Physics, second year senior (joy)
(On Call) Associate Algorithm Developer, Textron Systems Corp, Maui Ops.
yospe#hawaii.edu http://www2.hawaii.edu/~yospe Non commercial email only