Subject Index

Interactive Fiction Created: Feb., 2002 - Last Update: Jan, 2012

Dwenodon Interactive Fiction is a method of writing that allows the reader to explore the world created by the author while trying to solve puzzles, reach stated goals, and discover new things about the fictional world in which the story takes place. Originally called "text adventures", works of interactive fictions have evolved into a sophisticate genre with a small, but dedicated following. This is my first (and so far only) attempt to create a work of interactive fiction.

Designing an Online Interactive Fiction System

On this page I chronicle my adventures in creating an online interactive fiction playing system. My test case game is Hunt the Wumpus which I am using to test out each new feature of the gaming system.

Camper Van Project Last Update: May 17, 2011

Lately my time has been primarily devoted to two projects: 1) converting a cargo van into a camper van so I can do some exploring, and 2) trying to become fluent in Spanish, since that is a common language in the parts of the world I am most interested in exploring. (e.g. Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Southern California, Nevada, Baja, and México.)

My other hobbies have pretty much been set aside for now, although I have been renewing my interest in bird watching.

Constructed Languages Last Update: Nov. 9, 2010

This secton is devoted to the hobby of inventing languages. Some people like to build model railroads, I occasionally enjoy building model languages. Here you will find my linguistics-related projects.

Cartoon Animation Last Update: Feb, 2008

For a time, a few years back, I dabbled in cartoon animation. You can see a few of my cartoons on YouTube. This link takes you to a series of animation tutorials I wrote while learning to use the animation software.

Cryptography Last Update: Aug, 2010

Here you will find some fun cryptograms to work, and my own ramblings on the subject of making and solving encrypted messages.

Cellular Automata Last Update: Mar, 2003

The fascinating world of celluralr automata, or "Eploring Worlds Made of Tiny Robots". Here you will find some of my experiments with cellular spaces and rule sets. This class of "games" includes John Conway's famous Game of Life made famous by the late Martin Gardener in his Scientific American column Mathematical Games

Music Composition Last Update: Oct, 2007

From time to time I like to dabble in musical composition and orchestration using my hardware and software synthesizers. Here are some of the pieces I've written. Others can be found on soundlick.com.

Personal

In Case You're Interested, which you are probably not, My name is Gary Shannon. I'm a retired video game programmer. You probably haven't heard of any of the video games I worked on: Astro Blaster (Coin-Op game manufactured by Sega about a thousand years ago). Cyberstorm I and II. Trophy Bass 3D, and Pro Pilot, to name a few.

This website is undergoing a facelift, so it's temporarily messy

Programming Projects

• Glyph Design A pair of programs for designing alphabets and pictographs or hieroglyphics.

Computerized Linguistics and Machine Translation

• Chomp - A machine translation interlingua
• Parsing by Search and Replace

Artificial Intelligence

• Dec 2008 Ignorant Chunking or How noun and verb phrase chunking can be done without reference to parts of speech.
• Nov 2008 How a chatbot might learn specific facts and general patterns from its conversations.
• Oct 2008 Fusion Grammar Another new way to parse natural language sentences.
• Sep 2008 Progamming a chat bot to understand a sentence.
• Jul 2006 A different approach to conjunctions in Link Grammar Parsing
• Jul 2006 Random notes on parsing for meaning
• Dec 2006 Some random notes on fusion parsing
• Dec 2006 Some more random notes on fusion parsing
• Dec 2005 Parsing by Search and Replace
• Apr 2003 Philip - A conversational Chatter Bot program.

Number Theory

• Factor tables for a class of interesting number

• Attempting to Evolve a Better Factorization Method

Some Really Stupid Old Cartoons

• Stupid Cartoons

Some of my Drawings and Paintings

Link coming soon