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KIP - How it started

The Knowbotic Interface Project [KIP] of the Institute for New Media [INM] has been created as a vision and then as a project by Gerd Döben-Henisch. He has a background in Linguistics, Phonetics, experimental Psychology, Philosophy, Theory of Science and formal Logic. His Ph.D.-thesis ``Nichttheoreme'' (1989) (engl: Non-theorems) was a purely logical one. During all his studies he was always inspired by the question `What is meaning?' and `How does meaning develop through the course of live?'. Already during the time of his Ph.D.-thesis he searched for methods to reconstruct the phenomenon in a computational way.

His first attempt was to develop a grammar-learning algorithm using text-input. This was done while he was working at the CIS (`Centrum für Informations und Sprachverarbeitung' der Ludwig-Maximilian Universität in München).(Cf. the paper ``T1 - Ein selbstlernendes System zur interaktiven Konstruktion von Analyse- und Synthesegrammatiken für natürliche Sprache'' (1992) at the Institute for New Media. As expected, the unsolved problem of meaning produced severe limits on the task.

Invited by Peter WEIBEL, he started then a new project at the INM called ``TOP-Compiler'' (TOP := Text-to-Object-to-Picture). The goal was to establish an algorithm to transform natural-language-texts into sequences of pictures of a pre-established picture-world which by itself contained only objects which could be generated by algorithms. Assuming pre-defined meaning relations, it is possible to construct such a TOP-Compiler. This was explained e.g. in the paper ``TOP-Compiler - Eine neue Technologie für Animationen?'' (1993), given as a speech at the congress Werbung+Illusion at the fair of Frankfurt. But the programming work of static meaning relations is still very unsatisfying.

Then the author tried to attack the problem directly by postulating the Knowbotic Interface as the first choice to handle the phenomenon of meaning adequately. A first publication of these ideas was given at a workshop on Interactive Television at the INM June 1994. The paper was entitled ``Knowbots und Interaktives Fernsehen. Das Knowbotic Interface Projekt als Herausforderung an die KI.'' (An english version is meanwhile available under http:// www.phil.uni-sb.de/ tightrope.html).

In September 1994 it was again Peter WEIBEL who enforced the development of this vision by a grant given by the Ars Electronica Festival 1995. Backed up with this support, we could start Phase I of the KIP officially at the INM in November 1994. We called the prototype ``The BLINDs WORLD I'' because the organisms in the first virtual world had sense organs for touching, hearing, smelling and tasting, but they could not see.

The project was joined with great idealism by Leo POS and Thore SWINDALL, who have been the main programmers of the virtual world and main parts of the knowbots. Then we received additional support by Sonja SCHELLENBERG and Joachim RASCH, who contributed their Diplomwork to the construction of an Motif-Client for a normal User Interface. In March Raoul SCHOLZ and Michael KLÖCKNER entered the scene. Raoul was backing up Leo and Thore whereas Michael realized the language module within the knowbots. In the final rush Michaela Martini was helping us to give us some `outlook' for the Ars.

We would also like to mention Markus FIX, Sevo STILLE, and Peter FRANK from the INM who `supported' the project during all phases with their constructive questions and comments.

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