[Nell] Collaboration on Nell.

[Riedl, Mark]

Hi Scott,

I'm pleased to be back in touch with you. What you describe is similar in some respects to my mobile ARG project (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~riedl/pubs/ace11.pdf) where I propose end-user content authoring plus some very simple AI support. Well, there is nothing terribly unique in that work that will directly translate to Nell. But I am very interested in the problem of AI augmenting human design of stories and games. My students and I have been thinking hard on whether an AI system can make it possible with someone (say a teacher) to create a complete, functional computer game without any programming or game design skills/experience. This is a very hard problem, and probably more complicated than you would want for OLPC. I think your ideas of good authoring tools augmented by some incremental planning sounds right.

The trick is going to be in the underlying knowledge representations used by the planner. STRIPS-like representations could box users in if they are not rich enough for what users want to express (and brittle to change if one is not an AI expert). Case-based planning could be an interesting alternative, in particular if cases are learned with hierarchical structure similar to that of Universe/Wide-Ruled. A CBP system could in effect learn the hierarchical story fragments by watching end-user authoring. The closest to this I've been able to come up with so far is: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~riedl/pubs/iccbr11.pdf (with my close collaborator Ashwin Ram, who is now at PARC).

Anyway, sorry to brain dump on you and throw all the papers your way. I should be back up in Boston at some point for Jeff Orkin's PHD defense. I'll let you know and maybe we can chat in person. In the meantime, I am happy to continue to brainstorm with you via email, Skype, or G+ hangout.

Regards,
Mark

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Mark Riedl
Asst. Professor, School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Tech
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~riedl/

On Mar 20, 2012, at 7:07 PM, "C. Scott Ananian" <cscott at laptop.org<mailto:cscott at laptop.org>> wrote:

(Context: https://twitter.com/#!/mark_riedl/status/181727307856216064 / https://twitter.com/#!/mark_riedl/status/182231657674317824 / section 2.2 of http://cscott.net/Publications/OLPC/idc2012.pdf)

Hi, Mark.  Chris Ball and I attended your "Intelligent Narrative Generation" talk at MIT back in August (at the invitation of Nick Montfort and the Boston-IF group), and it sparked a lot of our subsequent thinking.  So we'd love to collaborate on Nell.

I think the most logical focus for collaboration would be the story model, which you've got a lot more experience with.  We're very interested in making the story models highly editable, so that teachers (and the students themselves) can easily write stories and/or edit existing stories to make them more remixable.  Merging the Wide Ruled/Story Canvas style of editors with the more powerful planners in your work would be very interesting.  Incremental planning is also very interesting to us -- rather than writing the entire story at once, concentrating on writing one 'episode' at a time, while leaving threads open to weave into subsequent episodes (as in the UNIVERSE work).  The broader work you've done on narrative arc and suspense is also very interesting -- can it be used to improve teacher's lesson plans and integrate them into a longer-term arc?  These are just my first thoughts; what were you thinking?
  --scott

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      ( http://cscott.net )
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