[MUD-Dev] Re: darkness/visibility

T. Alexander Popiel popiel at snugharbor.com
Sun Jun 14 18:51:26 CEST 1998


In message:  <3584199E.29AF at dial.pipex.com>
             Richard Woolcock <KaVir at nospam.dial.pipex.com> writes:
>
>   ]get the sword and examine it
>
>I also differentiate 'it' and 'them' depending on whether or not the object
>ends in the letter 's'.

Random note: discriminating on 's' is poor; consider referring to
'several people' or 'the grass'.  Better to have your objects tagged
as singular, plural, or aggregational.  (Aggregational is important
so you don't pour one bucket of water into another bucket of water
and get a bucket of waters...)

>   ]get the bread from my backpack
>   You get a loaf of bread from your leather backpack.
>   ]eat it
>   You attempt to stuff the leather backpack into your mouth.

I would expect the direct object to take precedence over the
prepositional indirect object.  Of course, the only real solution
is to maintain list of possible antecedents (prioritized via some
method (hopefully with actual use increasing priority)), and then
see which of the possible antecedents actually fit the circumstances.
This need not take up huge amounts of memory, since humans have
severe limits on list size (generally no more than 7, though beware
inobvious aggregates acting as a single entry), and there's not
much point in outperforming humans here.

>   [remove my backpack and get my sword and cheese from it, then eat it and
>    sheath it
>
>Which is...well...just silly.  Perhaps I should leave it as it is - its just 
>that I feel I could take it further.

Yeah, it's kind of silly, but what's the harm in that, as long
as nobody gets confused?

- Alex




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