This is a nuisance.
I just found out the the following code:
Table of E-Pad's Replies
Topic Knowledge
"me/myself/5835/user" or "user 5835" "You are user 5,835 of this device, bearing no significant difference between all the other 5,834"
will output the right answer to “RESEARCH ME”, “–MYSELF”, “–USER”, or “–USER 5835” but won’t work if we type “RESEARCH THE USER 5835”.
I could simply add the article in a new bracket… but. The E-Pad has about 250 nouns. I bet there is a quick way out of this, right?
You could just add the articles into the grammar for whatever your “researching” action is. Something like:
Understand "research [text]" as researching.
Understand "research a/the [text]" as researching.
However, I’m curious – you say there are 250 potential nouns. Are you sure you want to use topics for this? If some of these nouns represent actual objects in the game you could save yourself work by creating a research action which applies to things and a separate action which applies to topics.
It works, and thank you very much. As usual, it was easy but my mind just didn’t want to lock on the target.
Yeah, there are 250 names circa (maybe less, but no less than 150 synonyms). Only a part of it (20%, maybe) is about objects.
And, yes, that could’ve been a rather bright idea… if only it came up to my lazy mind in the beginning…
Well, my grannie used to say: “He, who doesn’t have brains, has to have legs”. I finally got the meaning of it.