Tales from the ArXiv: Was the AI Eaten by a Grue?

This paper, called NAIL: A General Interactive Fiction Agent, describes an autonomous agent for general parser-based interactive-fiction games.

(In my quick glance, I noticed a couple of slightly misleading statements about Infocom and their text-adventure games. For example, one figure implicitly seems to suggest that Trinity came out in the early 1980s, but it actually came out in 1986. I know, I know: I am being very picky.)

I hope that they didn't get eaten by a grue.

Or, given that I mentioned Trinity, maybe they reached into the beehive for a third time?

The Origin of Zork

Here is a short article about the origin of the landmark text-adventure computer game Zork.

We should calculate some network statistics of the Great Underground Empire map. (See the salient hand-drawn figure in the article.)

A Wikipedian Text Adventure

Someone wrote some software to turn Wikipedia into a text adventure in a really nice homage to Infocom. I approve!