Artifice and Intelligence

Fun video of the day: ABB FlexPicker Robots (Youtube)

In other news, I recently discovered Façade, an experiment in virtual storytelling which bills itself as "a one act interactive drama." Essentially, Façade is a game set in a basic 3D environment; however, interaction in Façade occurs mainly through the keyboard, not the 3D environment, with players typing messages in English to the two computer-controlled characters.

As with most games that rely on natural language processing, Façade really doesn't actually do a very good job of understanding the typed messages. The interesting thing about Façade though, is that thanks to the setup (you're stuck between a feuding couple) it doesn't really matter what you think, but your inflections still affect the story. So all in all, it's really well done from an interactive fiction point of view, although it's completely irrelevant to the language processing stuff I was looking into when I found it.