Comments on: The Story

By: ENKI-2

ENKI-2 — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 15:03:42 +0000

On the subject of “scientific storytelling”:
There have been several notable attempts, some more successful than others. These include the famous The Policeman’s Face Was Half Constructed, which was referenced constantly in the AI publications of the nineteen eighties as a success story.
The most interesting example of computer-generated narratives is the Arctech Gemini personal robot. There is scant material on the Internet about it: though all of the marketing material, software, and schematics are extant and available, one cannot determine the veracity of the marketing material without actually building a replica from the schematics, and I have managed to find no videos of the machine in action aside from a short television advertisement. That said, among its functions is speech recognition and the telling of procedurally generated stories — something that while easy to do poorly is very difficult to do adequately. Given that the Gemini also performed tasks like self-charging, the recognition of people from their voices, automatic house mapping and navigation, singing and dancing, and the tutoring of children with feedback from performance, it may well be that the Gemini created and told stories with narrative cohesion.

By: Josef Svenningsson

Josef Svenningsson — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 15:06:38 +0000

Here’s a nice twist on the scientific storytelling. A couple of MIT guys wrote a program to generate scientific papers that would look genuine of you just had a quick glance at them or just read the odd sentence here and there. They’ve had lots of fun with this submitting generated papers to low standard scientific conferences and getting accepted! Find out more here:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

By: Ginny

Ginny — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:07:08 +0000

Story-writing programs aren’t common but plot software has been around for years. Example: http://www.writersupercenter.com/plots/ Google ‘plot software’ to see a long list.

Somehow I don’t think any of them include the ‘conflict with the organist’ plotline, though.

By: John

John — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:18:20 +0000

You seem to be doing fine with “make’em laugh,” too. And if you make us wait much longer, it’ll be a clean sweep! Or, in deference to your situation, I guess it can be a hat trick.

Man, the possibility of a three-volume novel by Babbage with profuse illustrations (by which, I assume, he means “tables”) would be a sight to see. A shame he actually did his homework before getting the ball rolling.

Regarding Hollywood, I’m reminded by the one thing Dave Barry said that I found funny, to the effect that, somewhere in Hollywood, there’s a machine that designs the premises for sitcoms, running calculations and spitting out little cards that say, “three quirky yet attractive people share an apartment,” “five quirky yet attractive people share an apartment,” and so on. He wanted to destroy it, but it does explain a lot.

By: tikitu

tikitu — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:12:53 +0000

That is spectacular. Bulwer Lytton and Babbage on the same page… (Oooh, tell me Vampire Poets begins on a dark and stormy night!)

So Gary McGraw’s diss is at http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/farg/mcgrawg/thesis.html (the stories are in chapter 3). Montfort’s tiny story generator (which makes the reader do most of the work) is at http://grandtextauto.org/2008/11/30/three-1k-story-generators/

By: sydney

sydney — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:15:34 +0000

Hey tikitu, I think you just have to put the full url and people can cut-and-paste.. at least until I get more sophisticated comments plugin!

Computer-generated storytelling has a venerable history– I’m saving it up for Vampire Poets but check out Babbage’s Automatic Novelist, circa 1844-

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GORbAAAAQAAJ&pg=RA1-PA268&dq=babbage&lr=&as_drrb_is=b&as_minm_is=0&as_miny_is=1841&as_maxm_is=0&as_maxy_is=1844&as_brr=0&client=firefox-a#v=onepage&q=babbage&f=false

(you see how awkward those links are?)

By: tikitu

tikitu — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 11:49:39 +0000

Oh hey what should I do to make my links actually links?

By: tikitu

tikitu — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 11:44:24 +0000

Bella: feel free, I’m quite sure I didn’t invent it.

Sydney: the more I think about it, the more appropriate MINSTREL seems for Hollywood films. It basically worked by template matching: taking familiar pre-defined chunks of story-potential and clicking them together. Which seems to be all that most of Hollywood is doing anyway, and the Difference Engine is probably cheaper to run than a stable of scriptwriters.

In defence of those guys, though, they were trying to figure out what makes “a story” (in that incredibly optimistic symbolic AI spirit: “Once we build a machine that can do it, we’ll understand it!”). TALESPIN made a tiny simulation of characters with motivations and actions with consequences … oops, turns out there’s more to a story than that. Later attempts tried to work in reader-directed narrative structure, but that (of course) turns out to be the hard part.

(It doesn’t help that the simple business of producing sentences, let alone stories, that read naturally turns out to be extraordinarily difficult.)

As for the human brain seeing stories, Nick Montfort has an example.

Erk. I just hit “19th century search functions”. That is just begging to be taken literally…

By: E-Wit

E-Wit — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:49:48 +0000

Keep it up, Sydney — my friends count on me to alert them to the latest Lovelace and Babbage. And I do!

By: sydney

sydney — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 08:55:44 +0000

HI Bella– As to whether presentations are worth it.. I dunno– never been called ‘ditsy’ before I must say so it must have an unfortunate effect of some kind. TED hasn’t called yet, anyways..

- Martha– thank you very kindly, it really makes my day when I hear people are enjoying the comic!

- Snowbody– I don’t know if I could have gotten it myself– I used to read Martin Gardener’s Annotated Alice over and over when I was a kid, I guess it’s where I picked up a taste for footnotes!

- tikitu– heh there’s a guy attempting to make Hollywood films even worse than they already are with a storytelling software, similar to that hit tune thing I need to find a link to. I don’t know about these entirely artificial stories, they strike me as successful only in the way UK plug sockets are successful artificial faces. The human brain will force a story on anything even vaguely story-shaped!

- Ceridwen– I can’t wait for that part too :D

- Pat- a Google books gag seemed called for.. gotta say though, I seem to be google books greatest fan at the moment, no way I could do the comic without their amazing 19th century search functions.