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David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)'s posts Post Back to profile
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Aedius Filmania ⚙️🎮🖊️

@david_chisnall

Maybe in the Star Trek world they use an unambiguous logique language, easy to translate in any unambiguous language, but we loose that in the English translation.

That would explain a lot the universal translator ;)

1 January at 12:14 | Wall-to-wall | Open on lavraievie.social
6 comments
Dave Irving
lp0 on fire :unverified:
Space Hobo Actual

@Aedius @david_chisnall The Star Trek voice computers always seemed to react like very advanced #InteractiveFiction parsers. They would respond to a wide variety of queries and commands, but most actors spoke in a very constrained way and often the computers would prompt further or give error messages.

So you'd get back "please specify which of the 3271 bulkheads you wish to open" or "Unable to comply" and you'd have to re-phrase your order. There's a famous scene where Lwaxana Troi is frustratedly pulling a sausage out of a frozen margarita and saying "Oh I am just TERRIBLE with computers...", suggesting that interaction with them was still a skill that needed training or practice.

@Aedius @david_chisnall The Star Trek voice computers always seemed to react like very advanced #InteractiveFiction parsers. They would respond to a wide variety of queries and commands, but most actors spoke in a very constrained way and often the computers would prompt further or give error messages.

1 January at 13:18 | Open on teh.entar.net
Space Hobo Actual

@Aedius @david_chisnall And it made sense in that world that a crew of effectively Space Navy officers and enlisted spacers had been taught to be precise in their language, as so many of the tasks in a crew setting like that are performative speech. You need to give unambiguous commands to shipmates AND equipment, and need to quickly give updates like "standing by" or "aye, sir" or "probe launched: contact in 634 seconds...".

it was so well covered that the ambiguities we see are always jarring. When someone is standing in a crowd of 10 people, and a mix of crew and locals are coming up and staying down, the call is always "four to beam up" and *somehow* the transporter operators know which four. How? Well that's just what filmmakers call "shoe leather": the kinds of details and procedure that would take so long that they distract from the story without even giving any useful flavour.

@Aedius @david_chisnall And it made sense in that world that a crew of effectively Space Navy officers and enlisted spacers had been taught to be precise in their language, as so many of the tasks in a crew setting like that are performative speech. You need to give unambiguous commands to shipmates AND equipment, and need to quickly give updates like "standing by" or "aye, sir" or "probe launched: contact in 634 seconds...".

1 January at 13:21 | Open on teh.entar.net
Archangel Zeriel

@spacehobo @Aedius @david_chisnall

> When someone is standing in a crowd of 10 people, and a mix of crew and locals are coming up and staying down, the call is always "four to beam up" and *somehow* the transporter operators know which four. How?

I'd also point out the kind of domain-specific machine-learning pattern matching that I've used in the real world to great effect -- 99% of those scenes I can remember, the people who are to be beamed up are standing still and looking slightly upward, in a way that if you saw only a screenshot of the episode you'd probably pretty easily pick out the four people who were supposed to be beamed up.

It would not surprise me to find that (in the fictional world, natch) the computer underlying the transport operator's interface is highlighting a selection of people in a given target zone who are standing in the "beam me up" posture.

Contrariwise, most emergency beam-ups seem to involve either much more specific commands or "all crew in the area, only".

@spacehobo @Aedius @david_chisnall

> When someone is standing in a crowd of 10 people, and a mix of crew and locals are coming up and staying down, the call is always "four to beam up" and *somehow* the transporter operators know which four. How?

I'd also point out the kind of domain-specific machine-learning pattern matching that I've used in the real world to great effect -- 99% of those scenes I can remember, the people who are to be beamed up are standing still and looking slightly upward, in...

1 January at 16:23 | Open on tenforward.social
Bakunin Boys

@Aedius @david_chisnall look up lojban. Also while I think the idea of NLP as programming isn't taped out, it's also a bad plan to do this for humans. Humans are good at communicating gaps in logic. I feel like that's important.

1 January at 23:56 | Open on aus.social
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