Ben Bitdiddle, frustrated from the long hours of work he put in while
dealing with Louis' awful code, decided to quit Ur-Bits and look for
a better job. Calling up his old pal Alyssa P. Hacker, he managed to
get a good referral from her and was soon gainfully employed at a
startup company in Cambridge working on question answering problems
for the military.

Ben wasn't allowed to know about most of the system, since his clearance
hadn't processed yet, but the parser and representation systems weren't
classified, and his boss, Milly Speck, put him right to work on those.

``Ben, my boy,'' said Milly, ``Alyssa said you're quite good at getting
the most out of simple systems. That's good news for us, because this
natural language processing is very hard and we need to get some demos
out the door soon.''

``One of the big things the military wants is easy access to its
databases.  If some low-level soldier wants to know something, they
shouldn't have to know database language to do queries. Fortunately,
most questions are fairly simple, so we can use semantic transition
trees to turn easy questions directly into database queries.''

``We need to get queries for the COUNTRIES database and the WEAPONS
database up and running for a demo in two days. Unfortunately, our
main STT designer is out right now for paternity leave. Can you do it?''

``Sure!'' said Ben, frantically thinking back to 6.034. But to his
relief, he found that things were fairly under control. The COUNTRIES
database semantic transition tree was mostly done, although it had a
few bugs and he was able to write the semantic transition tree for 
WEAPONS fairly easily.

