Lojban In General

On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 11:08:15PM -0500, Matt Arnold wrote:
> Hey jbopre,
>
> I managed to persuade Andrew Plotkin to attend Penguicon. He is one of
> the foremost contemporary authors of Interactive Fiction, AKA "text
> adventures". For more information, please see
> http://www.brasslantern.org/beginners/ and http://ifdb.tads.org/
> Andrew is giving a talk about programming language design,
> specifically the Inform 7 programming language that is a subset of
> English used as source code for Interactive Fiction.
>
> I'm trying to come up with new ideas for panel discussions he can be a
> part of. And then I realized, since we have so many Lojbanists
> attending Penguicon this year, what if there is a topic that the
> Lojban community and Interactive Fiction programmers have in common?
> Like parsers. I myself don't know enough to flesh out the concept. Any
> other overlap topics? Do you have any help to offer?
>
> -Matt
>

I work quite a bit with parsers, but I'm extremely new to lojban.
My very first impression, however, is that one interesting thing
about interactive fiction parsers is that you pick a subset of
english that is flexible enough to be fun, yet not so flexible you
make your job too difficult.

The interesting thing about an IF game that used lojban for its
input is that you'd be able to parse any grammatical sentence, but
you're still going to handle roughly the same number of cases you
would in an IF game that uses English as its input.

I don't know how much time IF authors spend figthing ambiguity or
trying to bend the parser to express the solution they have in mind,
but my first guess is that this is a relatively small percentage of
the total time spent writing IF.

But since I have no idea, I'll suggest that a topic on how language
parsing both enriches and detracts from the play experience might
well be fertile ground for brainstorming ways to explore this same
topic in a lojban-specific way.

-Alan

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Posted by rlpowell on Sun 08 of Mar, 2009 02:39 GMT posts: 14214

On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 11:08:15PM -0500, Matt Arnold wrote:
> Hey jbopre,
>
> I managed to persuade Andrew Plotkin to attend Penguicon. He is
> one of the foremost contemporary authors of Interactive Fiction,
> AKA "text adventures". For more information, please see
> http://www.brasslantern.org/beginners/ and http://ifdb.tads.org/
> Andrew is giving a talk about programming language design,
> specifically the Inform 7 programming language that is a subset of
> English used as source code for Interactive Fiction.
>
> I'm trying to come up with new ideas for panel discussions he can
> be a part of. And then I realized, since we have so many
> Lojbanists attending Penguicon this year, what if there is a topic
> that the Lojban community and Interactive Fiction programmers have
> in common? Like parsers. I myself don't know enough to flesh out
> the concept. Any other overlap topics? Do you have any help to
> offer?

I don't know that I have anything useful to add, but I did want to
point out
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Colossal+Cave&bl=y

-Robin

--
They say: "The first AIs will be built by the military as weapons."
And I'm thinking: "Does it even occur to you to try for something
other than the default outcome?" — http://shorl.com/tydruhedufogre
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/

To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org
with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.