|
|
|
candle simile
Saturday, April 27 2002I've taken two different approaches to the artificial intelligence used in my chat system. One is to create highly-analytical sentence parsers that attempt to divine the actual meaning of a sentence before coming back with a response. The other is to look for simple common strings and then come back with random grammatically-correct and contextually-sensible responses. I'm finding the first approach terribly complicated, especially given the craziness of normal idiomatic human language. This makes the second approach considerably easier, providing satisfactory responses for relatively little invested effort. I have a feeling that an ideal automated conversing system would make use of both approaches, perhaps just saying "uh huh" much of the time, the same way humans do when choosing not to think.This afternoon I took Sally for another bicycle-powered dog walk to the remote corners of Prospect Park. We sat for awhile in the woods under a tree while I drank a beer and studied a Java programming textbook. Across the narrow arm of water was a young black couple equipped with fishing poles. The guy kept pointing to a patch of shoreline crowded with reeds, telling his girlfriend, "There are some big muddafuckin' fish over there!"
On the edge of Prospect Lake, we came upon a group of Latino kids who were interested in petting Sally so long as she didn't bite. "No, she doesn't bite," I assured them repeatedly. I gave the kids little treats to hand to Sally, but they still were nervous that she'd bite them when taking the treats from their hands. Lots of kids seem to have the fear that animals are incapable of distinguishing between their flesh and the food that they are holding - I remember, as a kid, worrying about horses biting me when I fed them grass. But eventually the kids mustered the necessary courage and handed Sally her treats, which she took politely. Delighted with having survived the experience unscathed, the kids jumped for joy and giggled the way little kids always do in such situations.
There was this other dog (a Pit Bull mix) who kept jumping into the lake to retrieve sticks tossed by his master. Sally is afraid of deep water and was clearly jealous of this other dog's fearlessness. She ran back and forth along the shore barking at him as he swam towards her, eventually grabbing the end of his stick and playing tug-of-war as he clambered up the embankment.In the evening Gretchen and I went on a double date with her upstate friend Katie and her new boyfriend Louis (who is a professional fisherman or something like that). Originally Gretchen had wanted to go to the restaurant Lupa, but for once I nixed the plan on the theory that Lupa has "a bunch of trained monkeys" working in the kitchen. (True, this is based on one bad experience with overly-al-dente pasta, but I'm entitled to my prejudices.) So we went to the Park Avalon near Union Square instead.
Later on we were joined by Mary Purdy (who is visiting from Los Angeles, where she is pursuing an acting career). We talked about this and that, including the fact that Mary's old boyfriend is dating Tor! Spell!ng and the two are so in love that the old boyfriend is finding his picture in supermarket tabloids, complete with manufactured quotes. Mary has met Tor! numerous times and claims that she is so thin that hugging her is like hugging a candle. (The candle simile was a natural consequence of eating in Park Avalon, where each table is lit by its own skinny white candle.)
Throughout the meal, I was drinking cosmopolitans almost continually.After our meal, Gretchen took Mary and me into a fancy hotel called simply "W" so she could show us "the grass that grows next to the elevator." Sure enough, in low wooden boxes set on either side of the elevator are swaths of some sort of grass, wheat grass perhaps. On a whim, we took the elevator to the twenty-somethingth floor, where we ducked into a custodial room and pilfered as many pens, pencils, teabags and items of glassware as we could conceal within our clothes. We were only wearing light jackets, so we couldn't conceal all that much, but Gretchen resolved to return again in the future equipped with a backpack.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?020427 feedback
previous | next |
