XYZZY

Here's something interesting. http://www.inform-fiction.org. It appears to be a bit of software for writing interactive fiction. Anyone remember Zork? Back when I was a kid these were vaguely popular computer games where you wander around inside a story. Infocom was by far the highest profile creators of these games, and they had built a moderately clever interpreter which would let you control the game by simply typing in english.

The clever thing about Inform seems to be that you can use it to write interactive fiction by typing in english. In other words, this thing interprets both directions. The author writes in english, the computer interprets this and builds a model world based on this composition. Then the 'reader' explores this world interactively by writing in english, which is also interpreted by the computer in the context of the model world. I haven't played with it yet, but does look quite interesting, particularly since it seems to be extendable with lots of pre-made widgets. There's even an academic paper about it on the website. If nothing else, its an interesting concept.