Say that you own an ice cream parlor. Whenever you bring on a new employee, you expect that you will have to train them. You explain the job: "this lever pumps the cones... never pump ice cream into your mouth... the chocolate shots are in a bucket under the sink..." The new employee bobs his or her head in agreement.
What next? Do you toss the them the keys and say "lock up at eight"? Of course not. What comes next is testing and repetition; you want to make sure that they "get it."
For the purposes of describing Brainhat programming, the dumber the counter sitter, the better the analogy; Brainhat only knows what you tell it. Furthermore, the natural task progression that comes naturally to a human--the concept of "steps"--is meaningless to Brainhat. You must lay out proposition milestones that help a conversation graduate from one stage to another. To Assure that the scenario you are describing to Brainhat "works" requires testing and repetition.
Let's take a specific example. Say that you want an ice cream parlor exchange to progress from the arrival of a customer to the question "do you want a sugar cone?"
If the speaker is hungry then the speaker wants ice cream. If the speaker will have something then the speaker wants something. If the speaker wants ice cream then ask if the speaker likes vanilla ice cream. If the speaker does not like vanilla ice cream then ask if the speaker likes chocolate ice cream. If the speaker does not like chocolate ice cream then tell the speaker that the speaker likes wierd ice cream and ask if the speaker is unhealthy. If the speaker likes ice cream then ask if the speaker wants a sugar cone.Brainhat has chocolate ice cream. Brainhat has vanilla ice cream.
Consider that we might take multiple paths along the way. The user might want chocolate or she might want vanilla. She might even ask for ice cream of no particular flavor (wierd). Notice that I have tried to bound the conversation so that we get to the "sugar cone" question by almost any path. This is not a requirement; the conversation can become unscripted at any time. However, once we fall off the subject at hand, Brainhat will run out of things to say. It will be up to the user to take over the lead in the conversation.
How might the conversation go?
Scenario development takes some patience. Occasionally, Brainhat's logic will take a turn that you hadn't anticipated. Or you may ask the user a question that is likely to be answered in a fashion that Brainhat doesn't interpret correctly. Accordingly, the questions you ask and the statements that you make should lead the interlocutor toward a dialogue you have already tested.
The good news is that you can stuff Brainhat full of amusing, off-topic information so that if the user does stray, there will be something unexpected to discover. Today, for instance, I heard someone in our office tell Brainhat that they don't like cold weather. Brainhat told the person that Egypt is warm, and that the person should go to Egypt! I had coded that into a scenario and forgotten about it. It was a amusing surprise to hear it re-surface.
If you wish to experiment with the ice-cream scenario, here are the additional words you will need to include into Brainhat's input files:
define flavor-1 label flavor child attribute-1 define chocolate-1 label chocolate child flavor-1 orthogonal flavor-1 define vanilla-1 label vanilla child flavor-1 orthogonal flavor-1 define ice-cream-1 label ice cream child food-1 typically cold-1 define sugar-cone-1 label sugar cone label cone child food-1