9 About Me •Assistant Professor, Computer Science @ NC State •Director, Principles of Expressive Machines (POEM) Lab •Strange Loop #3 •I <3 functional programming, logic, proofs, etc. •Research: tools & languages for interactive narrative, game AI, procedural generation, system modeling
Using Examples to Learn Rules Things humans do: ● Hypothesis-driven science ● Test-driven development Things computers do: ● Example-driven program synthesis ● Data-trained classifiers
How should we design the tools (game levels, code editors, interfaces, programming languages) necessary for humans and computers to do these things together?
Mental Model Alignment Theory 18 Press right, Mario goes right
Press A, Mario jumps YouTube “Extra Credits,” episode “Design Club - Super Mario Bros: Level 1-1 - How Super Mario Mastered Level Design.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH2wGpEZVgE
Mental Model Alignment Theory In sum: *Mental models simulate an external reality *They make predictions and explanations *They generalize from examples *They revise upon failure
0. Clever Mechanics 30 “Iron-clad rules & limitations that never change” In Cosmic Express: * Tracks can’t cross over one another * Each passenger must be taken to a matching box * Each train car can hold 1 passenger * Passengers will try to hop into any empty car that passes them
Puzzles: small, intentionally-crafted solution space Designed Problems: bigger solution space, may be co-designed with problem Programming: big solution space, problem precedes solution 53
Most of us are coding with an incomplete mental model of our programming language (see: Gary Bernhardt’s WAT talk) 60 https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
Most of us are coding with an incomplete mental model of our programming language … but most of our bugs come from poor mental models of our domains 61
Writing Tests count_os(“strangeloooop”) = 4 count_os(“object oriented”) = 2 count_os(“functional”) = 1 64 Each test is a communication of our mental model to the program
Solver-aided tools: directly run our mental models as programs? 71 …but how do we form correct mental models of the solution space, navigate it, and change it?
Cognitive Artifacts 72 David Krakauer Competitive: enhance our abilities when we have the artifact, but leave us just as powerless as we were before using it when we stop using it. Complementary: give us new abilities that we can internalize and use when the artifact is discarded.
Takeaways 75 1. Automated systems that develop mental models are more powerful than ones that make them obsolete 2. More research is needed to understand how!
Collaborate! 76 https://go.ncsu.edu/poem * Apply for a Ph.D. in Computer Science at NC State! Deadline December 15 * Faculty/industry collaborators welcome!
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