Weblogs: Intelligent Agents

Knowledge Representation and Interactive Fiction

Tuesday, April 22, 2003

Knowledge Representation is the age-old AI problem of mapping knowledge onto data structures. Interactive Fiction is basically a text-only adventure where you type in each instruction (or multiple instructions) that a character must perform. Every now and then I get this idea of combining a text adventure (well its interface) with a form of knowledge representation. I don't know why, and I can't place why I feel that this makes sense.

So its really about interacting with a knowledge base as if it were a text adventure. Locations become topics, for example Bruce Willis. To get to the location about Bruce Willis, teleporting there directly is a little difficult. You'd have to start out with something broad, like "Its an actor", and gradually building up more detail, "The guy from Die Hard and Armageddon". Once you get there - to the location that is Bruce Willis, you'd be able to explore the nearby locations - his career, details about his life, his marriage, related websites, interesting information.

Thankfully the more I think about this relationship between KR and IF, the more reasonable it is to see IF as nothing more than a shell in this instance - a command line. Ahh, I've been here before - when implementing a shell "API" for my proxy. Good! I was starting to worry about my mental state :-)


[ Weblog | Categories and feeds | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 ]