The text appearing at the end of this page is excerpted from Connections, a companion book to James Burke's BBC series on history and technology by the same name. In the passage below, Burke describes the battle of Agincourt that took place near Agincourt, France, on October 25, 1415, between the English armies of Henry V and those of the French. Henry had brough his armies to France to settle the Englsih claim to the French throne. At Agincourt, Henry found his forces greatly outnumbered, but, as Burke describes, the English possessed a technology that virtually rendered obsolete the military technology used by the French: the longbow. As a consequsence, the English won what is considered one of the greatest millitary victories in history, due almost entirely to the advantagous use of superior technology. This victory began the change that replaced feudalism with more egalitarian forms of social and political structure.
"What does this have to do with discourse planning?" you might well ask. The longbow was a bit of technology that had been around for almost 600 years before Henry marched on northern France. But by the fifteenth century, military experts had forgotten how to use it effectively. In fact, before the English brought the longbow to the continent, bows were typically fired not by pulling the arrow back to one's ear, but by holding the bow parallel to the ground and pulling the arrow back to one's waist, thus decreasing the accuracy of the aim and shortening the effective range.
Like the longbow, AI planning technology has been around for a number of years. In the 1970's and early 1980's, the natural-language discourse generation community eagerly adopted early AI planning systems to assist in the automatic selection and structure of content in multi-sentential texts. But these early AI planning systems were limited in their power and used ad hoc approaches to reasoning about action. Subsequent advances in AI planning that addressed these limitations were not incorporated into discourse planning systems. As a result, the two communities each developed their systems in isolation from each other for a number of years. The discourse planning system Longbow extends recent work in hiearchical, least-committment AI planning and applies this extension to the generation of multi-sentential text. As a result, Longbow generates plans with attractive formal properties, can easily incorporate new advances in AI planning technology into the context of discourse generation and can produce plans that represent important aspects of discourse structure.
Nevertheless, Kenneth Branaugh will never do a film on discourse planning.
At dawn on 25 October both armies had been in position all night. The French had chosen the worst possible position from which to strike: they were between two woods: Tremecourt and Agincourt, which stood about three-quarters of a mile apart, but closed at the point where the French would meet the English to about half a mile. Into this gap would go all 25,000 French. As dawn rose, the French were in no state to fight. If had been raining all night, making the battlefield sodden with heavy, clinging mud and most of the French knights had spent the night in the saddle in order to keep dry and were now standing around to keep their armour from getting muddy. The English were not much better off. In the previous seventeen days they had ridden or walked the 270 miles from where they had landed, with only one days rest. For eight of those days they had been carrying heavy stakes cut from the woods to the south. It had rained most of the way and they had had little to eat but nuts and half-cooked meat. Many of them were suffering from bronchitis and dysentery. And they were outnumbered four to one by the French.
The armies took up their battle formations. The French, whose 25,000 included 15,000 mounted knigths, drew their riders up in five ranks, the first two ranks dismounted, with a few crossbowmen in among them. The English formed three groups, four ranks deep, of dismounted men-at-arms, with wedges of archers between them. On the wings, facing inward, were two more groups of archers. For four hours nobody moved. The French knights were arguing about whether or not to charge, and by 11 A.M. there was a lot of jostling and pushing as the differences in rank and region began to show. No knight wanted to be in the second rank at the charge. Insults were exchanged and arguments flared as the motley nature of the army, drawn from all over France, became clear. Meanwhile Henry had moved his men forward to within bowshot of the French, about 300 yards away. The stakes the English had carried for eight days were stuck in the mud, angled towards the French, points up.
Still the French shoved and muttered, but did not move; Henry decided to make their minds up for them, and ordered his archers to fire into the air. Arrows from a thousand bows rained on the French, galling the horses and wounding the tighly packed mass. Suddenly, the French charged, apparently without any central order, straight across the mud at the English. This time Henry's archers fired for the horses, brining down riders in the hundreds. Many suffocated in the mud, unable to move in their armour, as their compatriots piled on top of them; many others were dispatched by English archers running forward to slide a knife between the joints in their armor. In half an hour it was over. The Engllish had lost 500 men; the French 10,000. The myth of the invincible knight was shattered.
The weapon that has so suddenly turned the medieval social order upside down was the Welsh longbow. It had been introduced by Edward I, and was a formidable weapon that could shoot a rider at 400 yards, and with special steeled points would even penetrate armour at close range. An experienced archer could loose nine arrows a minute, and, as the grim jest of an English writere put it, when the French would turn to show their backsides to the English in disdain at the bow, `the breech of such a varlet has been nailed to his back with an arrow, and another feathered in his bowels before he should have turned to see who shot the first.' Fully three hundered years after Agincourt the longbow was still considered by many military experts to be the finest weapon any army could wish for.
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