A Voice for Koko the Gorilla 
One of the most pleasant experiences I had while working for Alan Kay's
Vivarium Program at Apple Computer was the work
I did in designing and coding a softare package to allow Koko the gorilla
to "have a voice". An array of on-screen buttons, each with an
image hand-selected by Ron Cohn and Penny Patterson of the Gorilla Foundation,
would play a sound sample of the corresponding word whenever Koko would
press them. The software, called "Lingo" (before the name was
coopted for MacroMedia's Director), used a file full of sound resources
for the samples (typically the HyperCard stack used to gather the sound
samples), and a ScrapBook full of PICTs for the images, and associated them
by name. Lingo kept track of all Koko's interactions with the system, and
saved each utterance, date- and time-stamped, in an archive file, for subsequent
inspection, review, and linguistic analysis. Lingo also allowed the human
researcher to take notes on a different screen, and saved those notes to
a different, but carefully synchronized time- and date-stamped archive file.
I had the great pleasure of meeting Koko, on several occasions, and had
the opportunity to see her engage in conversation (via sign language) with
Penny and others. These experiences left a healthy appreciation for animal
intelligence, and helped formulate my thinking about how
the mind works (intelligence is basically just a set of useful, adaptive
behaviors) and how an Artificial Life system like
PolyWorld might be able to work its way up
from a computational Aplysia (sea slug) to a computational bug, mammal,
and ultimately a computational human and beyond.
Of course, I had it easy... I just had to write the software. Mike Clark
and Tom Ferrara had to design and build the hardware that would both expose
and shelter a monitor and a Macintosh from a very large and very powerful
gorilla! A recounting of some of the adventures may be found in this
chapter, written for Brenda Laurel's book, The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design.
