Lycanthrope

As with the other two stories, there were many questions for Lycanthrope which were clear to ISAAC. One type of question which I have not yet presented can be seen in the following:

• What is the meaning of ``lycanthropy'' ?
• The magical condition which allows a human to change into an animal form.

This question represents answering based on what was known prior to reading the story; at least in the ISAAC case when it was evaluated, the pre-existing conceptual knowledge contained the ``normal'' concept of lycanthropy. When asked to define the word ``lycanthropy,'' ISAAC will retrieve the original concept rather than the newly understood meaning of the term.

The next question represented an interesting answer, from the perspective of the system's capabilities:

• What happened to Ed?
• He turned into a were-car.

A number of things ``happen'' to Ed throughout the course of this story. But, the memory supertask will return things which are more highly active, and recent concepts in memory will be more highly active than ones reasoned about earlier. As a result of the memory system, then, the last event which happened to Ed is what is returned. The actual answer is the following concept:

:IS-A STORY-LYCANTHROPIC-TRANSFORM

:AGENT HUMAN-5420

:OBJECT HUMAN-5420

:STARTING-FORM-IS HUMAN-5642

:ENDING-FORM-IS CAR-8421

:METHOD-OF-TRANSFORM MAGIC-SPELL-8001

This concept represents the fact that Ed (conceptually stored as human-5420) has turned himself from a human form into the form of a car; in other words, he is a were-creature whose ``animal'' form is a car. The system does not create the word ``were-car'' to attach to this; I chose to make that modification when I created the English form of the answer. I also replaced ``Ed'' with the appropriate pronoun as that sounded more natural to me.

The final question I would like to consider is the following:

• Name three types of information that the book gives the narrator?
• The ingredients to use in the ritual, the time to do it, the incantation to use.

The form of this question was somewhat unexpected, and ISAAC would normally have not been able to handle it. However, I was able to take advantage of the fact that the memory supertask will continue to return concepts as long as an outstanding request exists. To have ISAAC answer this question, then, I modified the question to become What is information that the book gives the narrator? When a memory retrieval was done to find the answer, the ingredients concept was returned. If the memory request had been canceled at this point, that would have been the only answer. By simply allowing the memory supertask to continue searching for correct answers (until three concepts had been retrieved), I thereby achieved the effect of naming three types of information.