Introduction

Peter Small

Welcome to the Web site continuation of Lingo Sorcery

The Lingo Sorcery book ended with an epilogue promising that the book was only a beginning and would be continued on the Web. Well here it is, this site contains three extra chapters which will expand a little on the contents of the book.

This site also contains some other stuff which will take you on to introduce you to some new and exciting possibilities: the design of Intranets, Web objects and intelligent agents. This is where my current interests lie and I hope to drag some of you along with me.

I had planned to include this material in the book itself but the total content exceeded the publisher's brief and had to be pulled out at the editing stage. It was this that prompted the idea of extending the book onto the Web.

Not being confined to the practical limitations of publisher's book sizes, I have also been able to include a little background information to give you some idea as to where these ideas came from and, more importantly, where they are heading.

I'm presuming that you will have reached, or obtained, this Web site by recommendation or request and you will want to read the whole thing at a leisurely pace off-line (rather than have a casual flick through on-line). For this reason the design (or lack of design) has been optimized for emailing or down loading as a single complete file and contains only the barest minimum of essental images.

Also, please be aware that this Web site is an experimental Web site object - the details of which are explained later. The concept does away with the notion of a Web site appearing at a single fixed location (URL) which clients have to visit. This Web site object can travel around to appear anywhere on the Web (or perhaps even on a CD-ROM). It can also be transferred from person to person as an email attachment or delivered via an info bot.

As such, it is possible that this version you are reading may now be out of date or missing important ongoing developmental additions and attachments - particularly those relating to the creation of actual web robots.

However, if you find this stuff interesting enough, you can check out the latest version and updates by connecting up to the Internet and using this Web site object to send off an appropriate info bot to get the necessary updates. Full details of this facility are explained later.

This Web site also provides me with an opportunity to create an essential link between the Lingo Sorcery book and my CD-ROM "How God Makes God" (HGMG) which was the source for many of the ideas.

HGMG provides an explanation of human life in terms of probability, game theory and computer concepts. Whether or not you agree, with the conclusions arrived at in HGMG, the product does present many neat paradigms, explanations and technical tricks which are useful for understanding and exploiting biological intelligence mechanisms. These provide the seeds for exploring the possibilities of creating intelligent agents for use on the Internet.

For those who might have arrived at this site without having read Lingo Sorcery, "Lingo Sorcery - The magic of lists, objects and intelligent agents" is a guide to object oriented thinking and programming using a computer language called Lingo (used by Macromedia for their multimedia authoring application DIRECTOR).

The book is not necessarily limited to users of Director as the main purpose of the book is to provide an understanding of lists, objects and object oriented programming mind sets. These abstract concepts are essential for anyone wanting to design creatively and profitably in the environment of the WWW and the book may well serve as a primer before going on to more arcane object oriented stuff like Java.

The background to these two publications is a story of some thirty five years of unconventional research which has combined many different disciplines and a host of unusual social experiments.

This Web site is a continuation of this work and concerns taking the first practical steps towards designing Web robots and intelligent helper objects which have decision mechanisms which can emulate crucial elements of the human brain. Such intelligent agents could prove to have innumerable applications for Internet marketing, information retrieval, education and games.

Although much of what you will find at this Web site will have a strong element of fantasy and illusion, this is part of the object oriented armoury: which should prove to be eminently practical and useful for Web designers and computer programmers in general.

In the techy stuff (the Lingo worked examples at the end), you will discover the practicality of giving a software object (or a Web robot) a brain - complete with logic and emotional control mechanisms. Although exampled in Lingo, the principles are understandable enough for the techniques to be used with a variety of other computer languages.

BTW, I make no apologies for using the terms "emotion" and "brain" in describing software mechanisms. These mechanisms were mapped across from the models of biological systems which were used in HGMG.

Once you have overcome the conceptual hurdle of realizing that the design of such intelligence and a brain is at all possible, imagine letting these mechanisms loose: to interact within the environment of the Internet...

Enjoy.

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