The Electronic Cocktail Napkin

Parsing Diagrams

You can program the Electronic Cocktail Napkin to recognize configurations of elements arranged in certain spatial relations.

A diagram of circles and connecting lines is a "TREE".

Once you've defined the configuration, the Cocktail Napkin program will automatically recognize it when you draw it. It replaces simple elements (boxes, triangles) with a "house". It will replace a collection of circles and connecting lines with a "Tree".

You do this with the "search pattern" dialog. To define a new configuration, you first draw it, then call up the search dialog.

We drew a simple "house".
Cocktail Napkin identified 2 elements and 1 spatial relation.

With the "general" and "specific" buttons you adjust the definition of the house, making either the element descriptions or the spatial relations more general or specific. For example, the relation "immediately above" might be generalized to "above".

Next topic: Things that Paper Does Well Back to Napkin Topics