Date: 7 Oct 1987 17:07 EDT (Wed)
From:: "Bonnie J. Dorr"
To: *mac@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU
Subject: Gradual Serious Lunch

Friday 9, October  12:00pm  Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom

		    The AI/LCS Gradual Serious Lunch

			Orderly Student Lunch Graduate Dis-

			Karl Ulrich, Steve Eppinger, 
			Michael Caine, Andy Christian

                        MIT AI Lab


Disorderly lunches (where the students in line are boisterous and
virtually in any order with little effect on the amount of food eaten)
pose a great problem given the traditional quantities of food.
Standard, orderly lunches have operated with some degree of success
because fixed-person order lunches (e.g., GSL variety), rely on the
order between people to drive the line toward the lunch table.  In
order to satiate the varying sizes of freely ordered graduate
students, however, these orderly lunches have had to use meals that
consist of one plate and one fork for each graduate student.  The
result was an undigestible and uninteresting meal that did not even
begin to fill the gap between the student's mouth and stomach.

A shift from peaceful to clamorous lunching seems to be the answer.  A
lunch grounded on a noisy theory of ingestion---in this case, the
recently developed Graduate-Student-Lunch theory---has a menu that
satisfies many independent students, each representing a different
degree of hunger.  For disorderly students two descriptions are
appropriate: one is the type for whom noisiness takes precedence, and
the other is the type for whom sloppiness (such as spilling and
dropping food) is most important.  For either student, orderliness in
line is never relevant.

This new dining technique should also work for fixed-person order
lunches (though this is not likely).  Here we take advantage of the
parameters of GSL theory.  The claim is that, rather than allowing
unconstrained menus to be the basis for lunch, we can account for the
variation among degrees of hunger in graduate students with only a
simple, finite list of parameter settings.  For disorderly students,
there are two parameters: the amount of time spent standing in line,
and the amount of time since the last meal eaten.

At this lunch, an implemented, GSL-based meal that feeds both orderly
and disorderly graduate students will be presented.

Comeandgetthat food.
(Eat hearty.)