ABSTRACT
It would be nice for people building understanding programs if the basic elements of all stories were scripts. If that were the case, SAM would be capable of understanding any story for which it had the knowledge. But, of course, we cannot begin to put in every possible script so as to account for every possible story. We can imagine a ‘what to do when the teacher says he's giving you a B’ script, or a ‘what to do when a policeman pulls you over for speeding’ script. Scripts to handle these situations would work perfectly well. If the situations described were frequently encountered by an individual, then we might expect that individual to have these scripts. We must assume, however, that more general planning mechanisms are available to an actor in these situations. When a situation is frequently encountered by an individual, we would expect that individual to have a script for that situation. But people can deal with situations that they have never encountered before. They can do this because they have access to the mechanisms that underlie scripts.
