Robo-Tyrion

I said to Clare, "Game of Thrones has got rather boring since they decimated all the extended families. When it was the Starks vs. the Lannisters, you could identify with all the intra- and inter-family personal dynamics."

But I was wrong, Series 7 is just as gripping as ever. Grown up Machiavellian realpolitik.

Apart from really sharp screen-writing, brilliant plotting, fantastic locations and the mega-budget to pay for it all, one secret of their success is the continuity of actors. How would you handle a situation where actors playing Cersei, Tyrion, Jon, Jaime or Sansa decided to skip the next series?

Peter Dinklage plays Tyrion Lannister

Must enormously increase their bargaining power. What joy for their agents.

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The BBC is in trouble, not just for gender differences in pay but also for the sheer amount paid to their top staff. Radio presenter Chris Evans gets paid more than £2.2 million a year to present the breakfast show on Radio 2, which draws nine million listeners.

It's well-known in economics that the bulk of the economic value associated with a superstar ends up accruing to the talent themselves. Top footballers, rock stars and, yes, presenters get paid stupendous fees.

The reason is that they own a monopoly on their personal skills and typically engage in an auction process (via their agents) which allows them to identify and achieve their monopoly market value.

No competition, you see. But more on this in a moment.

With the BBC it's more complicated as they are a monopoly buyer (to a first approximation) in the UK entertainment market. If you want a truly mass audience, the BBC can potentially deliver it in a way that ITV, Channel 4 or Sky can't.

In theory, this should give the BBC monopsony power - lowering the price it has to pay for stars.

But in practice, the star will always win. The BBC cares most about the marginal, additional audience a top star can attract over the next best alternative. It's prepared to pay a hefty marginal price for that additional audience .. and since the absolute number of stars is not that large, the premium doesn't really register on its bloated budget.

Hence Chris Evans.

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But technology has a way of undermining these simple truths. Game of Thrones is scripted and recorded. A lot already gets done in post-production. Soon it would not be hard to lose the estimable Peter Dinklage and hire a similarly sized actor. Use the latest AI to restore Mr Dinklage's face and voice and you've saved, no doubt, a shedload of money - and perhaps the series, if Mr D. was otherwise going to be a no-show.

I understand there's plenty of discussion around copyright for personal avatars and digital representations in Hollywood right now.

How is that going, I wonder?

Chatbots: conversation as AI planning

I just love those YouTube videos of Internet-connected dolls. They're Wifi-linked to IBM's Watson, or some similar AI-in-the-cloud.

You'd think that the conversation would be scintillating - insofar as talking to a small child might have its moments.

But no, in the clip the adorable child is always shown asking the doll, "How far away is the Moon?" and the doll shows its conversational prowess by reciting Wikipedia.

Surely we can do better.

It's good to recall that we converse in order to achieve objectives. Sometime those objectives are indeed objective - as when we wonder how far away is the Moon.

Most of the time, though, the objectives are more about our more basic human desires. The need for sympathy, approbation, bonding against a third party, humiliation and revenge.

Oh dear, I've been listening to Cersei Lannister again..

Cersei and Margaery

Conversation is composed of speech acts directed towards goals, the goals often being the alteration of emotional states. Real-life chat is therefore very dependent on the accurate reading of emotional cues: facial expressions, tone of voice or other body language. No wonder email and WhatsApp chats go awry so often.

This suggests that a chatbot (a better Eliza) should treat conversation as an AI planning task.*

Naturally I'm not the first to realise that - this 1980 article - but it's the next place to go.

This relatively recent Stanford review - Conversational Agents - is quite illuminating (PDF slides).

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Call me an old GOFAI-nostalgic but bottom-up number-crunching the stats is subject to diminishing returns as we move to higher cognitive tasks. Which is why I'm less than impressed by the tedious Google Assistant in Allo.

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* I mean like GPS. Most conversational chatbots - like Google Assistant - cope with the extreme difficulties of unrestricted natural language input by giving a series of response-text buttons for the user to select ("Tell me a joke").

In a formalised conversational model, the chatbot should treat the conversation as a two-person game-tree. The opponent (user) has a choice of possible conversational rejoinders ('moves') which the program has a chance of understanding, and which propel the conversation forward in some direction.

Best to look at the planner conversation 'speech-act' rule-base and list the possible responses (need a way to flag input-variables) so as to guide the user.

Example:

Chatbot>: "What's your brother's name?

[I understand best:
   1. <first-name>
   2. <first-name> <second-name>
   3. <name> but we call him <nickname>
   4. I don't have a brother.
   5. Could we move on to another topic?
You can enter the response number if there's no information to give.]

User>:  Jimmie.