[MUD-Dev] Re: OT, kinda, but yay :)

[Nathan F Yospe]

On Fri, 23 Oct 1998, Jon Leonard wrote:

:On Fri, Oct 23, 1998 at 03:31:00PM -0500, Koster, Raph wrote:  

:> ObOnTopicComment:

:> You guys thought about multiple language support for DevMUD? :) If
:> you're gonna support Unicode, decide now...!

:Unicode support is a very good idea, especially since it doesn't require
:much more than changing which versions of library functions get called.
:(strcmp, etc.)

But... oh, yeah, you noticed. :)

:That reminds me of another idea I've toyed with from time to time:  Machine
:translation in a MUD.  If you force all player communications to be in a
:form that the server can understand (that's the bad part), and have an on
:the fly text generation system, then you can allow players who don't even
:speak the same language to communicate, at least in character.

Yes. Very much so. Um. I've got some of this going on in my client
prototypes. But... well...

:The big problem is the immense amount of work invoved in writing natural
:language parsers (even restricted ones) and the output text generation.

Yes. I've only even started to attempt English, though the NLP is designed
to be language inspecific. I did cheat a bit on the work aspect, by using
a Neural Net to actually do most of the linguistics work.

:It also imposes certain kinds of structures on the internal workings of
:the mud.  It's no longer possible to create a room by just filling out
:the text descriptions, for example.

Exactly. On the other hand, everything becomes extremely dyanmic...
--

Nathan F. Yospe - Born in the year of the tiger, riding it forever after
University of Hawaii at Manoa, Dept of Physics, second year senior (joy)
(On Call) Associate Algorithm Developer, Textron Systems Corp, Maui Ops.
yospe#hawaii.edu http://www2.hawaii.edu/~yospe Non commercial email only