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<div>Hi Scott,</div>
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<div>I'm pleased to be back in touch with you. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); ">What
you describe is similar in some respects to my mobile ARG project (<a href="http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~riedl/pubs/ace11.pdf">http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~riedl/pubs/ace11.pdf</a>) 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. </span></div>
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<div>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: <a href="http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~riedl/pubs/iccbr11.pdf">http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~riedl/pubs/iccbr11.pdf</a> (with my close collaborator Ashwin Ram, who is now at PARC). </div>
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<div>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.</div>
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<div>Regards,<br>
Mark</div>
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<div>------</div>
<div>Mark Riedl</div>
<div>Asst. Professor, School of Interactive Computing</div>
<div>Georgia Tech</div>
<div><a href="http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~riedl/">http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~riedl/</a></div>
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On Mar 20, 2012, at 7:07 PM, "C. Scott Ananian" <<a href="mailto:cscott@laptop.org">cscott@laptop.org</a>> wrote:<br>
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<div>(Context: <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/mark_riedl/status/181727307856216064">https://twitter.com/#!/mark_riedl/status/181727307856216064</a> /
<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/mark_riedl/status/182231657674317824">https://twitter.com/#!/mark_riedl/status/182231657674317824</a> / section 2.2 of
<a href="http://cscott.net/Publications/OLPC/idc2012.pdf">http://cscott.net/Publications/OLPC/idc2012.pdf</a>)
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<div>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.</div>
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<div>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?</div>
<div> --scott<br clear="all">
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-- <br>
( <a href="http://cscott.net" target="_blank">http://cscott.net</a> )<br>
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