Interactive story writing is a new medium for creative expression. The story “writer” uses a computer game (such as BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights) to create an interactive story where the “reader” is an active participant. The state of the art is that the story (plot, character behaviors, character interactions, conversations, etc.) is specified by writing scripts. Unfortunately, scripting is to...

Our goal is to enable Non Player Characters (NPC) in computer games to exhibit natural behaviors. The quality of behaviors affects the game experience especially in storybased games, which rely on player-NPC interactions. We used Reinforcement Learning to enable NPC companions to develop preferences for actions. We implemented our RL technique in BioWare Corp.’s Neverwinter Nights. Our experime...

In a previous production experiment, post-focus compression (PFC) of F0 and intensity were found to be present in Persian. It was also shown that F0 and duration were the main correlates of prosodic focus in Persian. However, the perceptual relevance of PFC in Persian was not yet clear. The present paper reports the findings of an experiment on focus perception in Persian. Native speakers of Pe...

Sugar cane, an intermediate day plant, clearly received a stronger stimulus to flower during lengthening nights than during shortening nights. Flowering was vigorous under warm, lengthening nights (21 degrees ) but less so under cool, lengthening nights (16-17 degrees ). Warm or cool shortening nights either failed to induce flowering altogether or reduced it substantially. Under the warmer nig...

Background & Aims: An abstract is the best source of information within a content. The structured abstract is the best representation of the main source. Writing an appropriate abstract requires adherence to standards of abstracting. The aim of this study wasto investigate the compliance of Persian abstracts of research papers in medical journals of universities of medical sciences (type 1) wit...

Comprehensive explanation about milk oversupply is not available in the current literature because few studies have been done on this topic. In traditional Persian medicine, milk oversupply and its management have been described. The aim of this study was to investigate milk oversupply from the perspective of medieval Persian practitioners. In this study, some main medical resources of traditio...

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BACKGROUND To test the psychometric properties of the Persian version of Zarit Burden Interview (ZBI-12) in the Iranian population. METHODS After translating and cultural adaptation of the questionnaire into Persian, 100 caregiver spouses of Iran- Iraq war (1980-88) veterans with chronic spinal cord injury who live in the city of Mashhad, Iran, invited to participate in the study. The Persian...