On Star Trek: The Next Generation, why couldn’t Data use contractions in speech?
This was frequently brought up on the show when speaking of his limitations. Don’t contractions follow rules of grammar? I would think it would be a simple matter for a computer to use them every so often. What gives?
I believe that the original android, Lor, spoke naturally and with contractions. This so alarmed the local population that when Data was created, his speech was intentionally made to be stilted and less natural.
Calliope’s explaination rings a bell for me.
They didn’t specifically mention Lore’s contractions as a deal-breaker; just that he used them while Data did not.
Not using contractions can certainly make a person sound more formal and less natural, but in practice Brent Spiner would often let a contraction slip through. Overall, it’s just one of the dumber minor plots points on Next Generation, dragged out when the story calls for it and forgotten otherwise.
It helped further the Pinnochio syndrome that the writers made us sick with.
Brain the size of a planet and I can’t use simple contractions? God, I’m so depressed.
yes, i know i did, that’s part of the pun
The original specs called for contractions, but Dr Sung spilled coffee on the blueprint and interpreted it as “Erections”. Thus he became Fully Functional and nobody bothered to complain.
Data was also once beaten in a chess match by… Deanna Troi. When Data acted surprised, she said, “Well, it’s a game of intuition.”
Of course, it’s totally inconceivable a human could beat Data at chess, given the power of his brain. But that was the problem with Data; the nature of the character made it impossible to write him consistently. He wasn’t supposed to have emotions, either, but he demonstrated emotions all the time. His understanding of human behaviour grew enormously in the show’s run… but it was established that he had been a Starfleet officer for many years before the show started, so why had he learned so little up to that point?
Point of order: Troi was half-Betzoid, and therefore not a typical “human”.
And as for the last question, it’s possible he had spent his service up to that point on some small-crew ship, or even been in administration planetside. His service on the Enterprise may have been the first time he was in such close proximity to so many people on such a constant basis.
Learned so little about whom? I don’t remember it ever being established that he had spent all that much time around humans, and contrary to all evidence, I still like to subscribe to the hope that Starfleet is not a Homo sapiens-only club. Perhaps, given the nature of his emotionless operating system, he spent time with Vulcans.
Why? There are more chess board configurations than there are elementary particles in the known universe. Even a computer of Data’s abilities could not possibly be unbeatable, since it couldn’t anticipate every possible move.
No, he was set on easy mode. Spock beat the Enterprise computer at chess, but only to prove something was wrong with the computer (which should have never lost to him)
psycho, chess reduces to brute-force checking of all possible moves given current state and choosing the most optimal path. Hence Deep Blue kicking Kasparov’s ass around the block.
If Data and Troi were playing Go, it would be somewhat more believable.
So what? Presumably Data and Troi started their game with the standard initial board configuration. At that point it would have been impossible for him to see the optimal path. Troi may have found an optimal path to a winning configuration long before Data did, thus guaranteeing a win for herself.
And Deep Blue didn’t exactly kick Kasparov’s ass. In the six-game tournament I presume you are referring to, there were wins and losses on both sides, plus some number of draws. Deep Blue happened to leave with more points than Kasparov, but it certainly wasn’t because the computer was clairvoyant.
while it can be argued that Deep Blue was programmed specifically to combat Kasparov, still . . . Troi is no Kasparov. A chess computer, not pulling its punches, can lick the casual human player any day. Troi was no chess expert; she should have been slaughtered.
He could have been designed not to be a perfect chess player but instead to a challenging but not impossible competitor for most humans, because that would provide more entertainment for the humans.
Per the OP, anyone who’s read the Nitpicker’s Guide to the Next Generation will know that Data did use contarctions on several occasions.
It’s already been mentioned that Troi was not human. It may well be that Betazoids, like Vulcans, are gifted with an incredibly keen ability for strategy games such as chess. Also, I don’t believe it was stated at any time during the show’s run that Troi was not a chess expert. One cannot infer the non-existence of something simply because it has never been mentioned. Troi was arguably one of the least-developed characters on the series; it’s entirely conceivable that there are a lot of important things about her personal interests that we don’t know.
I’m still waiting for someone to explain the rules of 3-D chess in the first place.
I loved the episode where Data began dating a female ensign who developed a crush on him. He began developing his own “relationship” program for the appropriate way to act in various situations, including a “lover’s quarrel.”
And when they broke up in the end, Data just went back to being Data. Made me sad, I guess because we knew that Data should have felt badly, but wasn’t capable of it.