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Recursive Discursions
Rhonda sent me (some days ago - sorry, I'm being horrible about email again) this link to an interview with Jeeves. Yes, that's Jeeves, the search engine. Go look. I'll wait. It's funny.
I have wanted to write about Jeeves for a while - about how some people are fooled into thinking that Jeeves can understand English, when in fact it's not even a very sophisticated parser. (I want to tell everyone, "Oh, stop being so easily awed by technology already!") Racter and SHRDLU, back in the DOS era, both had a much better command of English grammar and syntax.
SHRDLU wasn't much to talk to, and only understood a very limited world (a tabletop covered with blocks, that it could manipulate with a mechanical claw) ... but SHRDLU understood that world and sentences about it ... backwards and forwards and upside-down.
And Racter, well, you could have amazing conversations with Racter as long as you understood that you were talking to someone who wasn't especially sane. Racter was one of the easiest programs to anthropomorphize that I have ever encountered. And I've spent quite a bit of quality time with it.
Actually, what the "interview" reminds me of is a dialogue between Racter and Eliza. Remember Eliza? Emulated a nondirective psychologist by taking apart your responses and wrapping them? ("What do you mean when you say that you are sometimes lonely?")
Eliza was no great shakes at parsing English either, and both in syntax awareness and in ability to remember what the user said and use it as fodder, Racter - nearly ten years and a lot of code later - could run circles around her.
(My favorite Racter quote has to do with its needing electricity for its dreams, and it was fastened to the side of my computers for ages.)
Anyway. In the January 1985 issue of Scientific American, A.K. Dewdney writes of Racter and other such programs. (No, I don't have that date in my head. It's just that I have kept this issue for this article alone. I don't think he's put it in one of his collections.) Dewdney decides to let Racter talk to Eliza directly, by running two computers and transferring the responses from one program to the other by hand.
ELIZA: Hello. Please state your problem.
RACTER: Excellent! Please excuse me a minute while I attend to some business. I'll be right back.
ELIZA: Why do you need to tell me excuse you while you attend to some business?
RACTER: Is it better to need or to despise? Why is it that I do need to tell you to excuse myself to attend to some business? Because electrons are brave. Braveness is nice, don't you think? And the needers all insist upon it. Do you imagine I am a Communist?
Dewdney comments:
Mercifully (for Eliza) we stopped the conversation at this point.
At a metaphorical level this conversation represents the relation between a plodding, rather unimaginative psychiatrist and an extroverted, manic, possibly dangerous patient. At a computational level a rather modest reflex-arc program has met head-on, so to speak, with a highly complex program, one capable of recursive discursions and endless chains of association.
And that, I think, says all that needs to be said. Except: Jeeves is no Racter.
I will end this with another lovely Racter quote, since its book (yes, there was a book - it's called The Policeman's Beard Is Half-Constructed) has long since gone out of print:
Bill sings to Sarah. Sarah sings to Bill. Perhaps they will do other dangerous things together. They may eat lamb or stroke each other. They may chant of their difficulties and their happiness. They have love but they also have typewriters. That is interesting.
© Columbine
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