May I add a teaser here? In 1986, prior to the idea of a Video Card, when all of Computer Science seemed committed to understanding natural human language, and the future promised better philosophy, better phrasing, and better parsers…
On page 65 of a book byTerry Winograd and Fernando Flores is a diagram labelled Conversation for Action. It shows nine separate states for an attempted action (all the ways that doing things might succeed or fail).
Of course, it’s an imperfect model, but in all that time I’ve never found anything better.
I stole it and re-coded it. It’s in the Balladeer library if you need it.
It provides all the opportunities for bifurcation that occur in our real world; the little negotiations which are fractal in their humanity:
- I’m going to do this now.
- … if that’s OK.
- No, go ahead.
- I have to be quick.
- That’s fine, I have to go soon now anyway.
etc, etc.
I intend to write some articles on it, but you caught me unprepared. So it will be a few weeks yet.