You’re not mad if you talk to a machine and it answers you back

Press, 14 January 1986, Page 28

You’re not mad if you talk to a machine and it answers you back

Gareth Powell reports My favourite cartoon in the British satirical magazine “Private Eye” (of which, incidentally, I was one of the original shareholders) shows two men at a party. One says to the other, “I’m writing a novel.” The reply is “Neither am I.” I am heavily into the process of writing a novel and I am using a process which I call Moll Flanders, after the novel by Daniel Defoe.

If you have read that mildly ribald classic you may recall that chapters had headings in italics, which ran along the lines of “In which Moll comes to London, mets an evil bawdy house keeper, earns three golden sovereigns .. and so on. I use this as a basis to nut out the framework of the novel by expanding a chapter heading into a descriptive paragraph, and then expanding that paragraph by stages into a finished chapter.

In the current exercise of writing another unpublishable novel, I am using a very advanced personal computer allied with a very advanced program which is doing much of the initial work for me.

The computer is from Sperry. I will write a review of the computer later, but it is worth mentioning it has 45 megabytes of disc storage — about eight million words — which will allow me to write War and Peace, Moby Dick and have room left over for a fulllength sequel to Poor Fellow My Country.

It’s an ideal amount of storage for a central computer in a small to mediumsized company. This Sperry computer also has voice control, and I have it programmed to accept 64 words spoken in a Welsh accent. I lost my temper the other day and said a naughty word and the screen signalled “BAD COMMAND.” It is like having my mother in the office. More on this computer later when I have fully explored its wonders. The program I am using with the Sperry computer is Framework 11. I have used the original version of this program a fair bit but the latest edition has several significant improvements. Basically, you start off with an excellent word processing program (not, perhaps, as good as Samna 111, but close, very close). Then you start adding the other features, beginning with a Thesaurus and a dictionary. The essential and unique component of Framework II is designed to help me produce another manuscript ready for that short, swift journey to the remainder table in the less-reputable bookshops. It is an idea processor which works in very much the same way as “Moll Flanders” (the book, not the trollop).

You set out a series of chapter headings, and then develop each chapter heading into an explanatory paragraph. After this, you shuffle them around a little to get some sort of pleasing symmetry, kill off some characters, introduce others, chuck in some suspense and, if you are feeling a little daring, add some S-E-X. But not too much in case you get excited. Framework II allows you to do all this with ease. As its name suggests, it works within frames on your screen and it is feasible to be working on one chapter on one screen while keeping another chapter available for scrolling on another. This helps you ensure that a character, who has just had the requiem mass, is not alive and well in a later chapter. Basically, Framework II is a very powerful word processor and database package, plus fully integrated telecommunications and graphic modules. It is an “everything” program. These have been receiving some criticism lately on the basis that they are inflexible, cumbersome and expensive.

In a sense, all of this contains some truth, although to assemble a series of programs that performed all the functions of Framework II would cost an arm and a leg. But the great .virtue of this program is the interchangeability of information and the consist-, ency of commands.

Take the interchangeability of information first. As business life becomes more complex, reports and decisions cease to be confined to one narrow spectrum of business. They spread right across the board. Information to be accessed, explained, expanded and acted upon comes from all areas of a company. Framework II has been enhanced and adapted to cope with these changes and to fit in with the newly expanded memories of personal computers. The spreadsheet component works at about twice the speed and can be made much bigger by accessing extra random access memory. It also has a neat trick called "sparse matrix implementation,” which tells the memory to ignore any cells in the spreadsheet which contain no information. This allows you to cram more into less.

If you want to be really daft you can write a spreadsheet that is 32,000 rows across by 32,000 columns deep. I cannot, in all honesty, think of one single possible use for a spreadsheet that big, but no doubt someone, somewhere, will.

Spreadsheets no longer live in a vacuum. They are part of and interrelate with databases, graphs and word processing. So integrated are they in Framework II that the 80,000-word dictionary works from the word processor and also works on the headings in the spreadsheet. With an “everything” program you can meld all the different information gathered in the component parts to produce an all-encom-passing report. So its first major virtue is it encompasses all areas of a complex report.

Its second virtue is the consistency of commands. There is a problem in learning commands to make programs perform.

If all was for the best in the best of all Candidean computer worlds, there would be a set of basic commands which would be used in all software programs.

That will happen when pigs fly. At the moment, the poor mug punter — you and me — has to learn a set of complicated commands each time we need to use a program. This is why many users still work with antiquated versions of, say, Visicalc. They simply cannot face the horror of learning all the arcane commands of a program over again.

It would be like leaving the Freemasons to join the Ancient and Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes.

An Australian marketing director of Imagineering once admitted to me that he did all the sales forecasts for Imagineering on Visicalc because he simply did not have time to learn anything new.

When you consider he was then responsible for half the country’scomputer personal software sales, including Lotus 1-2-3 and Symphony,

it gives one pause. With Framework II you do, it is true, have to learn a new set of commands. But once you have them sorted out — and they are logical and relatively easy to learn with plenty of help screens built into the programme — they aply right across the board. It does not matter if you are word processing, creating a spreadsheet or accessing a data base, the commands are all of the same family, are all familiar. This program is friendly, logical and easy to use — but you do have to learn a new simple instructional language to control it. And to program it properly and use all of its quite amazing power you need to learn a simplified programming language called, endearingly, Fred. An “everything” program allows you to work with just one set of commands. But one day you may not even have to learn them. It may be the Tower of Babel of program commands will soon be solved.

There is a program loaded on to the hard disc of the Sperry in my office which probably shows the way of the future. It is called Q and A. As it stands, it is already an excellent program with much going for it, but it promises more, much more.

Q and A consists of a fairly sophisticated word processing program and a substantial — but not immensely powerful — data base.

Nothing earthshaking in that.

Where the revolution starts is with another subprogram built in called Intelligent Assistant, which works with the database. According to the Penguin computer dictionary “database” is a word describing a filing system which you use when you want to impress the listener.

Supposing you have in your filing system a list of all customers, actual and potential, throughout New Zealand.

With most databases you can do sorts and searches by entering a set of fairly complex commands which define what you are looking for and set the limits.

With Intelligent Assistant you do nothing of the sort. You enter your request in plain English. “Give me a list of all customers who have spent more than $5,000 but less than $lO,OOO with us in the past year” — and the database responds instantly

with the answer.

Like a really intelligent assistant, the Intelligent Assistant can be taught to improve its knowledge. If there is a word in a command it does not understand it will ask you to define it and will then add the word to its dictionary. In theory, on this vast Sperry personal computer — vast in speed and memory, not in physical size — this is infinitely expandable with the amount of memory I have available. Theoretically, I should eventually be able to make the Intelligent Assistant cope with almost anything I want provided it is confined to the database.

As it stands, Q and A is something of a breakthrough in programs because of the way the Intelligent Assistant works with the database.

But this is plainly only a start. If commands in normal English can operate a database, making them drive other programs will not require an amazing work of genius. I foresee Q and A developing into a major “everything” program where all of its component parts will respond to simple English commands.

Imagine the scene. Before you print out a letter you tell it ‘“check the spelling” and “use my normal style” and ’’get the address of Wendy Giles from the database.” “Print three copies.” When, not if, this happens we will have escaped for ever from the thrall of learning complex commands, which make the Rosetta Stone seem like a school primer. At the moment, I am madly experimenting to try and take all this one step further. Nothing exceeds like excess.

There appears to me to be no logical reason why the standard English commands of Q and A should not be linked to the audio input of the Sperry computer. No reason whatsoever.

If I can get them integrated — and I believe I can — I will have a computer I can tell to start up, load a program, search a database for a series of addresses, meld them with a standard letter and then print out the results. And I will not have touched the computer once. So far, I have only got the Intelligent Assistant and the Sperry to work together to tell me the time when I ask it nicely. But this is just the beginning. Today a speaking clock. Tomorrow the world.