The Winograd Matrix

Richard Holeton

config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic" config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6" config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}" config.header.right: passage.name config.footer.left: " " config.footer.center: "[[About|The Winograd Matrix]]" config.footer.right: " " --  [align center] __THE WINOGRAD MATRIX__ by Richard Holeton [continue] I had set the table just so, got out the wine glasses with stems, and my dear Jenny has just come home. We are on a knife edge because of The Plague, not to mention my arrest and conviction. She pulls down her BioMask, making only glancing eye contact, and I see her taut jaw. I can't tell if it's the strain of being out in the world with other humans, or the strain of being confined with me away from them. Then it seems like the whole building shakes or shudders (Drillard would call it a *structural destabilization*). I feel a glancing blow off my head and *a ball crashes right through the table, because it's made of* > [[steel]] > [[Styrofoam]]

config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic" config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6" config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}" config.header.right: passage.name config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|over-packaged]]" config.footer.center: "{restart link}" config.footer.right: "[[Next >|never mind]]" -- What happened with Cofú the Intern was basically that, in the weeks leading up to the Curfews and Quarantines, he was annoying the shit out of everyone in the office with his nonstop conspiracy theories about how The Plague was a Neoliberal Deep State Plot to enhance social control through fear, discipline, and surveillance, and the fact that he was an Extreme Close Talker (without a BioMask = now a felony) who also poked you in the chest with his bony finger as he exhaled hotly in your face and expounded his paranoid delusions, coupled with his ubiquitous dandruff and toxic gassiness (possibly a result of the malodorous foods he always brought for lunch), etc. etc., all of which came to a head for me the day that Cofú loudly and in gross violation of my personal space insisted that my dear Jenny, assisted by Drillard, was implanting encrypted messages for Saudi Princes, Tech Titans, and other Plague Co-Conspirators on the Dark Web hidden in lines of code for the open-source game engine driving The Winograd Matrix™, and when Cofú finished overmicrowaving his week-old seafood stew, stinking up the entire office CollaboZone, and spun around splashing the hot fishy mess all down my one nice blue shirt, I admit I overreacted by sort of cuffing him on the collarbone with my upraised palms, an action which became in his mind the "choking death grip" that led the police to initially overcharge me with Aggravated Assault, later reduced to Simple Assault following the, I have to say, lukewarm testimony of the sole witness, Drillard.

config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic" config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6" config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}" config.header.right: passage.name config.footer.left: "{back link}" config.footer.center: "{restart link}" config.footer.right: "[[back to 'picking up the pieces'|picking up the pieces]]" -- In The Winograd Matrix™, now on its 10th sequel (*TWM: Attack of the Ferengi*), the Player Character (you) repeatedly encounters a series of multiple-choice situations described by a pair of statements that differ by one word or phrase, your selection of which resolves a pronoun disambiguation problem in the statements, but in different ways, thus producing variations in the game narrative, like slightly alternate realities. Choosing different antecedents for the pronouns can alter the meaning in subtle or profound ways. "It's like an interactive fiction thought up by your high school grammar teacher," I'd said to Jenny when she joined Kroneborg. The Non-Player Characters introduced in the first game (*TWM: Pandemic!*) continue throughout the series and include a vaguely discontented girlfriend/boyfriend/nonbinary (select your gender) Significant Other, colorful work colleagues, and, in some scenarios, local non-racially-stereotyped gang members. You must play through all the options in order to complete the game, while never really resolving, much less fully understanding, the Player Character's personal problems. The game has nevertheless proven addictive to millions—which I attribute to the writing team that I led until Kroneborg furloughed me over the choking thing.

config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic" config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6" config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}" config.header.right: passage.name config.footer.left: "{back link}" config.footer.center: "[[(RE)START THE STORY|set the table]]" config.footer.right: " " -- [align center] __About__ [continue] *The Winograd Matrix*, Copyright © 2022 by <a href="https://www.richardholeton.com" target="_blank">Richard Holeton</a> email: holeton [at] stanford [dot] edu <a href="https://ifdb.org/help-ifid" target="_blank">IFID</a> A9C1E4CC-621E-4ACF-97FB-FC9993CC6A9C Made with <a href="https://twinery.org/" target="_blank">Twine 2</a> and <a href="https://klembot.github.io/chapbook/" target="_blank">Chapbook</a> by Chris Klimas. [align center] *———*——— [continue] > *[[What is it]]* > *[[What are they]]* > *[[What happens]]* > *[[Alternate realities]]* > *[[Resisting power structures]]*

config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic" config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6" config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}" config.header.right: passage.name config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|never mind]]" config.footer.center: "{restart link}" config.footer.right: "[[back to 'never mind'|never mind]]" -- "*It's gotta be removed," Jenny says.* Meaning the *hair.* From the drain in the bathroom sink. By me. Again! I've had enough. I'm sorry. Do I even *have* hair? Other than in my nose? No. I do not have hair. I am in fact bald. Whose hair is that constantly clogging the drain? Yes it is yours, Jenny. Your long beautiful auburn-beginning-to-turn-gray locks, identical to those wadded in your hairbrush which hasn't been cleaned since 10 BP (Before Plague), the hairbrush you hold over the sink while brushing brushing brushing in the admiring mirror and dropping clumps of hair, hair that twists and globs together like thick licorice sticks congealed with grime and grease into foul slimy masses that fill the sink, choke the sink until it's impervious even to repeated treatments of super-toxic industrial strength Drain-D-Klogg®. Meanwhile the plumbers are still under Lockdown. Well dear Jenny, *you* just go ahead and remove your hair from the drain, I'm *done.* And clean it out too, while you're at it!

config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic" config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6" config.header.left: " " config.header.right: passage.name config.footer.left: "{back link}" config.footer.center: "{restart link}" config.footer.right: " " -- **[[About "The Winograd Matrix"|The Winograd Matrix]]** * *[[What is it]]* * *[[What are they]]* * *[[What happens]]* * *[[Alternate realities]]* * *[[Resisting power structures]]* [continue] *[[(branches)]]* __THE STORY__ [[set the table]] **1. [[steel]]** <blockquote> * [[Newton's Cradle Toy]] * [[Newton's Balls]] 1.1. [[anchored]] * [[over-packaged]] * [[Cofú the Intern]] * [[never mind]] 1.1.1. [[cleaned]] * [[Sharing Time]] * [[down in flames]] 1.1.2. [[removed]] 1.2. [[level]] * [[over my head]] * [[favorite tool]] * [[Trigger]] * [[pattern of discoloration]] * [[Back off, Mr Ed!]] </blockquote> __2. [[Styrofoam]]__ <blockquote> * [[Double Quarantine]] * [[recycling]] * [[Drillard]] * [[when the fire starts]] 2.1. [[completely illegible]] * [[f****** Ferengis]] * [[picking up the pieces]] 2.1.1. [[stop]] * [[disconnected dialogue]] * [[Winograd Matrix]] 2.1.2. [[run]] * [[Favatars]] * [[balls]] 2.1.3. [[or else]] * [[on the other hand]] * [[Either way]] 2.2. [[still rolling around]] * [[(Ferengi note)]] * [[Time Reversal]] * [[Backward Causation]] </blockquote>

config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic" config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6" config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}" config.header.right: passage.name config.footer.left: "[[< About|The Winograd Matrix]]" config.footer.center: "{restart link}" config.footer.right: "[[Next >|What happens]]" -- *"Winograd schemas"—after which both the story and the fictional game within the story are named—are pairs of statements with pronoun reference ambiguities, originally named for Stanford computer scientist Terry Winograd, who created an early example. Resolving the grammatical ambiguities, which usually have two different solutions (both of which are plausible), requires common-sense reasoning, so solving them has been proposed as a test of artificial intelligence.* *The Winograd schemas used here as narrative forks are adapted from or inspired by Ernest Davis, Leora Morgenstern, and Charles Ortiz's online <a href="https://cs.nyu.edu/faculty/davise/papers/WinogradSchemas/WSCollection.html" target="_blank">"Collection of Winograd Schemas"</a> (~~CC-BY-4.0~~). An early example, which creates the two major branches of the story, is: "A ball crashes right through the table, because it's made of [steel/Styrofoam]." In choosing which path to follow, the reader is effectively determining what the pronoun "it" refers to in the statement. In one case, "it's" made of steel and refers to the ball, and in the other case, "it's" made of Styrofoam and refers to the table.*