Determining literariness in interactive fiction

The authors of interactive fiction are beginning to demonstrate a concern for the literariness of their product. Literariness, as defined by Shklovskij and the Russian Formalists, is the quality of making strange that which is linguistically familiar, a quality Shklovskij termed ostranenie. By applying the principle of ostranenie, as well as other well-known literary principles, to the most serious interactive fictions, we can determine if this new genre exhibits the features of literariness. A study of Mindwheel, Brimstone, Breakers, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Portal, and Trinity suggest that the literariness of interactive fiction comes out of its concern both for making strange what is familiar and for making familiar what is strange.Neil Randall has published several role-playing games, and is working on a full-length critical study of interactive fiction. He is currently assistant professor of English.     

A Mathematical Analysis of Pānini’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Śivasūtras</Emphasis>

In Pninis grammar of Sanskrit one finds the ivastras, a table which defines the natural classes of phonological segments in Sanskrit by intervals. We present a formal argument which shows that, using his representation method, Pninis way of ordering the phonological segments to represent the natural classes is optimal. The argument is based on a strictly set-theoretical point of view depending only on the set of natural classes and does not explicitly take into account the phonological features of the segments, which are, however, implicitly given in the way a language clusters its phonological inventory. The key idea is to link the graph of the Hasse-diagram of the set of natural classes closed under intersection to ivastra-style representations of the classes. Moreover, the argument is so general that it allows one to decide for each set of sets whether it can be represented with Pninis method. Actually, Pnini had to modify the set of natural classes to define it by the ivastras (the segment h plays a special role). We show that this modification was necessary and, in fact, the best possible modification. We discuss how every set of classes can be modified in such a way that it can be defined in a ivastra-style representation.¹     

The way stylized language means: Pattern matching in the child ballads

This paper suggests ways in which the pattern-matching capability of the computer can be used to further our understanding of stylized ballad language. The study is based upon a computer-aided analysis of the entire 595,000- word corpus of Francis James Child'sThe English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–1892), a collection of 305 textual traditions, most of which are represented by a variety of texts. The paper focuses on the Mary Hamilton tradition as a means of discussing the function of phatic language in the ballad genre and the significance of textual variation.Cathy Lynn Preston is a Research Associate, Computer Research in the Humanities, at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is interested in folklore, particularly oral narrative; popular literature of the 18th- and 19th-century, particularly broadside and chapbook; the works of John Gay, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Hardy; Middle English romance and lyric. Her major publications areA KWIC Concordance to Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Books, and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, A Fragment, (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984) (co-authored with Harold D. Kelling), andA KWIC Concordance to Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989).     

The π-Calculus in Direct Style

We introduce a calculus which is a direct extension of both the and the calculi. We give a simple type system for it, that encompasses both Curry's type inference for the -calculus, and Milner's sorting for the -calculus as particular cases of typing. We observe that the various continuation passing style transformations for -terms, written in our calculus, actually correspond to encodings already given by Milner and others for evaluation strategies of -terms into the -calculus. Furthermore, the associated sortings correspond to well-known double negation translations on types. Finally we provide an adequate CPS transform from our calculus to the -calculus. This shows that the latter may be regarded as an assembly language, while our calculus seems to provide a better programming notation for higher-order concurrency. We conclude by discussing some alternative design decisions.     

Reasoning about programs in continuation-passing style

Plotkin's _v -calculus for call-by-value programs is weaker than the -calculus for the same programs in continuation-passing style (CPS). To identify the call-by-value axioms that correspond to on CPS terms, we define a new CPS transformation and an inverse mapping, both of which are interesting in their own right. Using the new CPS transformation, we determine the precise language of CPS terms closed under -transformations, as well as the call-by-value axioms that correspond to the so-called administrative -reductions on CPS terms. Using the inverse mapping, we map the remaining and equalities on CPS terms to axioms on call-by-value terms. On the pure (constant free) set of -terms, the resulting set of axioms is equivalent to Moggi's computational -calculus. If the call-by-value language includes the control operatorsabort andcall-with-current-continuation, the axioms are equivalent to an extension of Felleisenet al.'s _v -C-calculus and to the equational subtheory of Talcott's logic IOCC.This article is a revised and extended version of the conference paper with the same title [42]. The technical report of the same title contains additional material.The authors were supported in part by NSF grant CCR 89-17022 and by Texas ATP grant 91-003604014.     

AI & Society and society

This article looks at the broadest implications of public acceptance of AI. A distinction is drawn between conscious belief in a technology, and organic belief where the technology is incorporated into an unconscious world model. The extent to which we feel threatened by AI's apparent denial of spirit is considered, along with a discussion of how people react to this threat. It is proposed that organic acceptance of AI models would lead to a rebirth of popular spiritual concepts as paradoxical as the New Age ideas that have their roots in the theories of physics. Finally the relevance of this speculation is discussed in terms of how it could impinge upon public acceptability of AI technology.     

Integration of parametric and “ad hoc” second order polymorphism in a calculus with subtyping

In this paper we define an extension ofF [CUG92] to which we add functions that dispatch on different terms according to the type they receive as argument. In other words, we enrich the explicit parametric polymorphism ofF by an explicit ad hoc polymorphism (according the classification of [Str67]). We prove that the calculus we obtain, calledF ^& , enjoys the properties of Church-Rosser and Subject Reduction and that its proof system is coherent. We also define a significant subcalculus for which the subtyping is decidable. This extension has not only a logical interest but it is strongly motivated by the foundation of a broadly used programming style: object-oriented programming. The connections betweenF ^& and object-oriented languages are widely stressed, and the modelling byF ^& of some features of the object-oriented style is described, continuing the work of [CGL96].Part of this work has appeared under the title F ^& : integrating parametric and ad hoc second order polymorphism in the 4th International Workshop on Database Programming Languages. New York City, August 1993.The author was supported by grant n. 203.01.56 of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche-Comitato Nazionale delle Scienze Matematiche to work at LIENS.     

The Claremont Shakespeare Authorship Clinic: How Severe Are the Problems?

Ward Elliott (from 1987) and Robert Valenza (from 1989) set out to the find the true Shakespeare from among 37 anti-Stratfordian Claimants. As directors of the Claremont Shakespeare Authorship Clinic, Elliott and Valenza developed novel attributional tests, from which they concluded that most Claimants are not-Shakespeare. From 1990-4, Elliott and Valenza developed tests purporting further to reject much of the Shakespeare canon as not-Shakespeare (1996a). Foster (1996b) details extensive and persistent flaws in the Clinic's work: data were collected haphazardly; canonical and comparative text-samples were chronologically mismatched; procedural controls for genre, stanzaic structure, and date were lacking. Elliott and Valenza counter by estimating maximum erosion of the Clinic's findings to include five of our 54 tests, which can amount, at most, to half of one percent (1998). This essay provides a brief history, showing why the Clinic foundered. Examining several of the Clinic's representative tests, I evaluate claims that Elliott and Valenza continue to make for their methodology. A final section addresses doubts about accuracy, validity and replicability that have dogged the Clinic's work from the outset.     

Distributivity in Łℵ0 and Other Sentential Logics

Certain distributivity results for ukasiewicz's infinite-valued logic ₀ are proved axiomatically (for the first time) with the help of the automated reasoning program OTTER. In addition, nondistributivity results are established for a wide variety of positive substructural logics by the use of logical matrices discovered with the automated model-finding programs MACE and MAGIC.     

On the Axioms of Scale Space Theory

We consider alternative scale space representations beyond the well-established Gaussian case that satisfy all reasonable axioms. One of these turns out to be subject to a first order pseudo partial differential equation equivalent to the Laplace equation on the upper half plane {(x, s) ^d × | s > 0}. We investigate this so-called Poisson scale space and show that it is indeed a viable alternative to Gaussian scale space. Poisson and Gaussian scale space are related via a one-parameter class of operationally well-defined intermediate representations generated by a fractional power of (minus) the spatial Laplace operator.     

Reduction and unification in lambda calculi with a general notion of subtype

Reduction, equality, and unification are studied for a family of simply typed -calculi with subtypes. The subtype relation is required to relate base types only to base types and to satisfy some order-theoretic conditions. Constants are required to have a least type, that is, no overloading. We define the usual and a subtype-dependent -reduction. These are related to a typed equality relation and shown to be confluent in a certain sense. We present a generic algorithm for preunification modulo -conversion and an arbitrary subtype relation. Furthermore it is shown that unification with respect to any subtype relation is universal.     

Deterministic polynomial-time quantum algorithms for Simon’s problem

D. R. Simon stated a problem, so-called Simons problem, whose computational complexity is in the class BQP but not in BPP, where is the function or oracle given in the problem. This result indicates that BPP may be strictly included in its quantum counterpart, BQP. Later, G. Brassard and P. Høyer showed that Simons problem and its extended version can be solved by a deterministic polynomial time quantum algorithm. That is, these problems are in the class EQP. In this paper, we show that Simons problem and its extended version can be deterministically solved in a simpler and more concrete way than that proposed by G. Brassard and P. Høyer.     

A predicate transformer for the progress property ‘to-always’

The temporal property to-always has been proposed for specifying progress properties of concurrent programs. Although the to-always properties are a subset of the leads-to properties for a given program, to-always has more convenient proof rules and in some cases more accurately describes the desired system behavior. In this paper, we give a predicate transformerwta, derive some of its properties, and use it to define to-always. Proof rules for to-always are derived from the properties ofwta. We conclude by briefly describing two application areas, nondeterministic data flow networks and self-stabilizing systems where to-always properties are useful.     

Hierarchy theorems for two-way finite state transducers

Summary For a family of languages , CAL() is defined as the family of images of under nondeterministic two-way finite state transducers, while FINITE · VISIT() is the closure of under deterministic two-way finite state transducers; CAL⁰()= and for n0, CAL ⁿ⁺¹()=CAL ⁿ (CAL()). For any semiAFL , if FINITE · VISIT() CAL(), then CAL ⁿ () forms a proper hierarchy and for every n0, FINITE · VISIT(CALⁿ()) CAL ⁿ⁺¹() FINITE · VISIT(CAL ⁿ⁺¹()). If is a SLIP semiAFL or a weakly k-iterative full semiAFL or a semiAFL contained in any full bounded AFL, then FINITE · VISIT() CAL() and in the last two cases, FINITE · VISIT(). If is a substitution closed full principal semiAFL and FINITE · VISIT(), then FINITE · VISIT() CAL(). If is a substitution closed full principal semiAFL generated by a language without an infinite regular set and ₁ is a full semiAFL, then is contained in CAL^m(₁) if and only if it is contained in ₁. Among the applications of these results are the following. For the following families , CAL ⁿ () forms a proper hierarchy: =INDEXED, =ETOL, and any semiAFL contained in CF. The family CF is incomparable with CAL ^m (NESA) where NESA is the family of one-way nonerasing stack languages and INDEXED is incomparable with CAL ^m (STACK) where STACK is the family of one-way stack languages.This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. DCR74-15091 and MCS-78-04725     

Automatic surface reconstruction with alpha-shape method

In this paper, we present an algorithm for the reconstruction of piecewise linear surfaces from unorganized sample points with an improved -shape. Alpha-shape provides a nice mathematical definition of the shape of a set of points, but the selection of an value is tricky in surface reconstruction. F or solving this problem and the non-uniform distribution, we scale the ball according to the points density. The method discussed in this paper might be applied for surface reconstruction, and the process is fully automatic.     

Computing with Contexts

We investigate a representation of contexts, expressions with holes in them, that enables them to be meaningfully transformed, in particular -converted and -reduced. In particular we generalize the set of -expressions to include holes, and on these generalized entities define -reduction (i.e., substitution) and filling so that these operations preserve -congruence and commute. The theory is then applied to allow the encoding of reduction systems and operational semantics of call-by-value calculi enriched with control, imperative and concurrent features.     

Choosing reference classes and building provisional models

A well-known problem in default logic is the ability of naive reasoners to explain bothg and ¬g from a set of observations. This problem is treated in at least two different ways within that camp.One approach is examination of the various explanations and choosing among them on the basis of various explanation comparators. A typical comparator is choosing the explanation that depends on the most specific observation, similar to the notion of narrowest reference class.Others examine default extensions of the observations and choose whatever is true in any extension, or what is true in all extensions or what is true in preferred extensions. Default extensions are sometimes thought of as acceptable models of the world that are discarded as more knowledge becomes available.We argue that the notions of specificity and extension lack clear semantics. Furthermore, we show that the problems these ideas were supposed to solve can be handled easily within a probabilistic framework.     

The Wearable Motherboard™: The first generation of adaptive and responsive textile structures (ARTS) for medical applications

Virtual reality (VR) has been making inroads into medicine in a broad spectrum of applications, including medical education, surgical training, telemedicine, surgery and the treatment of phobias and eating disorders. The extensive and innovative applications of VR in medicine, made possible by the rapid advancements in information technology, have been driven by the need to reduce the cost of healthcare while enhancing the quality of life for human beings.In this paper, we discuss the design, development and realisation of an innovative technology known as the Georgia Tech Wearable Motherboard (GTWM), or the Smart Shirt. The principal advantage of GTWM is that it provides, for the first time, a very systematic way of monitoring the vital signs of humans in an unobtrusive manner. The flexible databus integrated into the structure transmits the information to monitoring devices such as an EKG machine, a temperature recorder, a voice recorder, etc. GTWM is lightweight and can be worn easily by anyone, from infants to senior citizens. We present the universal characteristics of the interface pioneered by the Georgia Tech Wearable Motherboard and explore the potential applications of the technology in areas ranging from combat to geriatric care. The GTWM is the realisation of a personal information processing system that gives new meaning to the termubiquitous computing. Just as the spreadsheet pioneered the field of information processing that brought computing to the masses, it is anticipated that the Georgia Tech Wearable Motherboard will bring personalised and affordable healthcare monitoring to the population at large.