Walk-through of Men Are Different

    With the various elements of ISAAC described, I now discuss how it all fits together to produce the creative reading behavior which the model must manifest to be a proper instantiation of the theory. To present this, I will discuss two ``walk-throughs'' showing the high-level processing being performed by the ISAAC system as it reads two different short stories. In this section, I will give an in-depth description of the behavior of the model while comprehending the story, Men Are Different. In the next section, I will give a ``highlights only'' view of the processing which takes place during the reading of Zoo. Both of these stories have been discussed before; both can be found in their entirety in Appendix A.

The first story to consider is Men Are Different by Alan Bloch. ISAAC processes the understanding of this story in the following ways. ISAAC is initially told to read the text file containing Men Are Different. The system is expressly told that the file it is to read is a narrative   science fiction text; as a result, ISAAC's control decides that the first thing it needs to accomplish is to see if the text has an attached title and/or author. This decision is the result of the default story structure packet which is controlling the system--that of a third-person narrative. The story structure comprehension supertask uses this default packet which immediately causes an expectation to be generated and given to the control supertask. This particular expectation controls the processing, momentarily pausing the normal ISAAC processing cycle. Instead, control explicitly requests the story structure comprehension supertask to locate a likely title and author. ISAAC's generic narrative story structure packet includes the information that a set of text with a phrase and an agent prior to the beginning of the first paragraph can be assumed to have an attached title and author. story structure comprehension makes use of this, treating the stand-alone phrase Men Are Different as the assumed title, and the supplied agent Alan Bloch as the assumed author. The author requires no further comprehending, it is simply recorded as the author of the current story and as being attached to an agent in the same reality that ISAAC is in. The title is passed on to the other supertasks so that further processing of it may occur.

The sentence processor parses the sentence for ISAAC; since ISAAC is starting the reading experience, no additional help in the form of         suggestions, anticipations, or expectations is available at this time. Still, the sentence processor recognizes the phrase as an extended state declaration: ISAAC expects an object to be related to another object in a given way. scenario comprehension tags Men (a type of agent which ISAAC is familiar with) as the first object and Different as the relation in question.

control now anticipates the finding of the second object; namely, what Men are Different from. This is accomplished by the generation of an   anticipation by reasoning which is given to the control supertask. But, at this point, no such answer is available. control decides, due to its knowledge of the importance of titles in most texts, that this is an important omission. ISAAC anticipates finding the answer to this pending question in later text pieces. Now that the title and author have been comprehended, various memory requests are generated. First, the title and author are remembered (more specifically, the memory supertask is requested by control to store the information). Next, a memory probe is requested to see if the system has either read this story before, read other Alan Bloch works, or read other stories about men being different. Since this is the first story reading episode, nothing is returned.

ISAAC is now ready to begin reading the body of the story. The pronoun reference task is responsible for determining that the I in the story refers to an agent whose occupation is archaeology. It is known that the story structure packet being used by the system needs to be changed. The generic story which ISAAC knows about is a third-person narrative. The sentence processor has just found a first-person pronoun acting in the role of an agent. This suggests to the genre identifier that it cannot be a third-person narrative, since it is known (also from the sentence processor) that the sentence in question is simple declarative. ISAAC does a memory retrieval and discovers that first-person narrative more closely resembles the story thus far and switches to it. This gives the story structure comprehension supertask the protagonist of Men Are Different for ``free.'' Meanwhile, character identification adds the fact that I is a reference to a story character.

By the middle of the first paragraph, ISAAC realizes that something is not quite right. It had been trying to understand the narrator as a human archaeologist. When it reads the phrase ``us Robots,'' all the     expectations and anticipations related to the human-ness of the narrator become invalid.   Creative understanding is now faced with the task of producing a workable understanding of the narrator. Usually, ISAAC would have to perform steps one, two, and three of the creative understanding process. In this case, these would fail, forcing the use of problem reformulation. However, ISAAC can skip these first three steps since the necessary reformulation is already given by the text--the narrator is a robot, not a human. Unfortunately, this does not solve ISAAC's understanding problem. ISAAC knows about modern-day robots which are industrial machines, capable of performing autonomously in various highly repetitive tasks, such as spot welding on a car. The robot which is being described in the first paragraph is very different from this. ISAAC's control decides that it needs to attempt to creatively understand the concept of robot it is being presented with and suspends its   disbelief in such an object for the benefit of the story. This decision is motivated by ISAAC's inability to understand the story within the conceptual framework initially possessed by ISAAC.

A normal memory retrieval returned a concept of robot which is insufficient to explain the story character. Other concepts which were retrieved from memory (factory machines, mechanical tools) are also too limited to provide an adequate explanation.   Creative understanding now attempts base-constructive analogy on the concept of robot. By making use of the existing robot concept and the previous concept of human, ISAAC attempts to merge these two items in order to create a new concept to reason about--i.e., ISAAC is attempting to create a new base from which to analogize to the current   robot. Using strong-FMS, ISAAC is able to produce such a concept--a new type of robot containing elements of the current robot concept and the best volitional agent it can retrieve from memory--a man. Man is highly primed in memory as it was the concept which was mistakenly thought to apply in this situation. The creative understanding process, then, takes the concepts of man and industrial robot and produces the new concept of a volitional, intelligent robot.

There are numerous concepts which could result from this merging--how does ISAAC produce the ``correct'' one? The process is guided by the needs of the story with the approach being that the least amount of change is what should be attempted first. If this is not sufficient, the   communicative agreement between author and reader will reveal the limitations as reading progresses and further alterations can be performed. The key elements to consider are as follows:

• ISAAC is dealing with a robot; therefore, the industrial robot concept is the one focused on. Alterations will be performed to this concept in an attempt to allow it to explain the story concept.
• ISAAC is also able to make use of the concept of man.
• Industrial robots are stationary; the robot in the story is obviously mobile from what the text contains. Therefore, movement is required. The concept of man explains that man moves by the use of legs or by the use of other machines designed for transport. ISAAC modifies the previously stationary robot to be capable of movement, through the use of legs. To handle the fact that the robot in the story also moves in ways which a man is known to move (for example, between planets), ISAAC further describes the new concept of robot as being man-like in shape. Man-like is also used since ISAAC has now answered the question of what Men are Different from--robots. ISAAC's understanding of standard narrative structures is that authors do not waste time presenting the reader with the blatantly obvious. So, in addition to being somehow different from robots, men must also have some similarities to robot (after all, it does not make sense to say Men are different from three ton boulders of granite; it's an obvious fact).
• The robot in the story is also intelligent and volitional. ISAAC uses the volitional and intelligence aspects of the man concept and modifies the original robot concept to contain those as well. There is no need, at this time, to fully explain exactly how the robot is intelligent--it is important only for the system to realize that it is.
• As a result of the minimalistic nature of the changes, the new concept maintains many of the characteristics of the original robot in the sense that it is made of metal, is resistant to damage, uses sensors and feedback as a control mechanism, and so on.

This set of changes has produced a new concept which is sufficient to allow ISAAC to understand the robot in the story. ISAAC then stores the new concept in memory as a story-robot. As the rest of the story is read, more information is ``filled in'' about the story-robot concept; for example, the fact that the skeleton of the robot is made of titanium is added. However, none of the additional facts which are discovered violates any of the predictions made by the newly created robot concept--they merely serve to produce a more complete description of that concept.

The rest of the story is read by the system in a similar fashion; I will touch on only a few highlights until the final two paragraphs. The main differences to the above procedure occur in the third paragraph. The second paragraph provides additional background, as does the fourth. The third presents the most problem, since it contains a high degree of metaphor. Men do not have bright flames as far as ISAAC knows. At this stage in ISAAC's development, I am choosing to ``punt'' on this issue; ISAAC's memory returns a scenario where bright flame is used as a description of superiority. This allows straightforward understanding of the sentence. As the research continues in the future, ISAAC should be required to attempt   creative understanding on this concept as well. Divine is a known concept and reinforces the assumptions made about bright flame. The sentence discussing the strands of the web is left non-understood. I do not provide a direct meaning, and ISAAC is currently lacking the necessary information to successfully understand it. The idea that the current civilization has lost something that Mankind had is understood; the assumption is that it is not a physical object, but something more abstract. When the story comprehension is complete, ISAAC is left   with an outstanding anticipation of understanding this concept.

The last two paragraphs act as a ``story-within-a-story.'' The control supertask must enable the system to understand the ending paragraphs in this way. This story, while short, contains a complex temporal structure. Time does not flow linearly in the story; any reader attempting to understand it, ISAAC included, must be able to handle this as it is these last two paragraphs which makes the point of the story. In order to appreciate the ending, the reader must have maintained an accurate model of the narrator, including its beliefs and goals, in order to understand why the robot's mistake took place. ISAAC needs to perform a similar   creative understanding process on the man in the story as it did on the robot narrator. In this case, however, the need to perform the creative understanding arises from a need to understand why the robot narrator acted in the fashion that it did; that is, ISAAC needs to understand the concept of man held by the protagonist of the story. As a result of this understanding, ISAAC realizes that the robot is seeing the man as more similar to itself than is warranted, and this explains the logical error.

  The key irony in the story can be seen as a dual shift within my knowledge organization grid (Figure 5 in Chapter 4). ISAAC is presented with a robot character which is acting as an agent rather than as a physical object. This is the first shift which must take place for ISAAC to ``make sense'' of the story. The twist ending occurs because the robot narrator decides to treat the Man, a physical agent, as a physical object and disassemble him with the intent of doing a field repair.

  During the reading experience, multiple cases are being built. A case is a memory of a specific experience in the life of a reasoner ([#!cbr:general!#]). First, there is the case representing the events of the story, a summary of what ISAAC understands of the text. Second, this case contains a subcase representing the flashback scene. Since it stands on its own as a separate event, it is an independent case. Third, there is a case which represents the actions of ISAAC as it read and understood the story. This case includes the information as to when the system realized that the main character was a robot and not a man, as well as other key points in the course of the reading experience. It is a trace of what ISAAC went through during comprehension rather than simply being the result of the comprehension task. If ISAAC had been able to empathize with the robotic narrator (currently beyond its abilities), a fourth case may also exist. This can be considered a ``pseudo-experience'' in the history of the system--it would remember it as being in the context of a story, but the events will seem more real than that. Such a case in memory could, for instance, aid the ISAAC if it ever has to deal with a person from a radically different culture and it remembers that one should not project a way of life onto another due to surface similarities.

If ISAAC is familiar with science fiction stories or with this author, the start of this reading experience will trigger remindings which aid the process. ISAAC is familiar with science fiction from the information I have provided it as background. As a result, the idea of a robot narrator will not require as much disbelief suspension, as measured by the amount of ontological movement required to achieve comprehension, as someone who had never read a science fiction story. Recall that for ISAAC to comprehend the story, it must be willing to accept that robots are the dominant lifeform in the future, that humans have practically died out, and that robots are capable of making the errors in logic that the narrator did. Had ISAAC refused to accept this world, the story will not be fully appreciated.