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From: nagle@well.sf.ca.us (John Nagle)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,sci.psychology
Subject: Re: Eric Mueller's Daydreamer
Message-ID: <25216@well.sf.ca.us>
Date: 4 Jun 91 17:40:06 GMT
References: <1991Jun3.075711.11333@coyote.datalog.com>
Lines: 25

jmh@coyote.datalog.com (John Hughes) writes:

>I recently finished Eric Mueller's book "Daydreaming in Humans and
>Machines", and I was quite taken aback by the overall coherence of the
>internal 'daydream' stream-of-thought generated by the program. I was
>wondering why I haven't seen more about this book. Has anyone read it?
>If so, what did you think of it?

     The idea is interesting, but it seems that most of the potential
daydreams were essentially built into the program.  As Muller puts
it, under "Shortcomings of the Program", "DAYDERAMER cannot daydream
for a long time and cannot generate many novel sequences".  The
program has provided to it a number of possible script fragments
and some rules for assembling them, and the number of possible scripts
resulting is limited.  

     There was a system in the 1950s (!) which generated scripts for
TV Westerns by somewhat similar means.  Anyone have the reference?

     Mr. Mulller seems to have moved from daydream to speculation.
The preface ends "Preparation of the revision for publication as a book was
made possible by the Analytical Propretary Trading Unit of Morgan
Staley and Company in New York."

					John Nagle