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Forget 1000 monkeys, could a PC write Shakespeare?
There are very few authors who don't use a personal computer to compose their works but, what if the computer could write a book on its own? That's precisely what a piece of software called MEXICA aims to do, and in fact is doing. MEXICA, developed by Rafael Pérez y Pérez, is a computer program capable of authoring stories all by itself. MEXICA's work isn't half bad if you believe blind comparisons between it and the work of a human author. According to The Discovery Channel "In an Internet survey that pitted the computer-generated stories against other computerized stories, as well as stories written solely by a human, readers ranked MEXICA's stories highest for flow and coherence, structure, content, suspense and overall quality." That may be due to MEXICA's editing skills.
As MEXICA works it analyzes emotional content and connections between characters, as the program's author describes it, "The program views a story as interesting when tension levels increase and fall throughout the piece. If the program finds that the story is boring or incoherent in places, it will replace or insert atoms until a version is deemed satisfactory." So, in essence, MEXICA keeps writing and rewriting until it is able to satiate its own internal yawn-o-meter.
Drawing on key elements of human creative writing process, the thought behind a system like MEXICA is baffling. Pérez y Pérez hopes that MEXICA will help us write better stories, but doesn't necessarily see a program like MEXICA replacing the craft of an actual, human, writer. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to polish my resumé.
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They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Duane said 9:17AM on 1-29-2007
Reminds me of "Racter" (the Raconteur), a program back in 1984 that capitalized on the whole Eliza craze of the time (who else remembers pitting Eliza the psycho-therapist against Parry the paranoid schizophrenic?) Anyway, the idea of computers generating literature goes well back into the 70s with Roger Schank's story generating software. His software would write fairy tales.
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~saul/essays/09racter.html
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Jeffrey Rizzles said 6:59AM on 1-30-2007
Now, if only we could write a program that could read that book and make it into a movie...
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Jack Tar said 9:03PM on 1-29-2007
If memory serves, in Nineteen Eighty Four (the novel) stories written for proles are authored in the same way.
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Sean said 6:50AM on 1-30-2007
My first reaction is to wonder whether the program is capable of creating stories that are sufficiently different to each other to be interesting to a human reader. You can get computers to simulate a focused creative task (eg write a ghost story), but it's much harder to get them to simulate true creativity of defining their own tasks broadly enough to result in original output (eg what kind of story shall I write? What kind of characters shall I invent?).
Sean
http://www.sean.co.uk
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Kevin said 12:20PM on 1-30-2007
Roald Dahl wrote a story about a machine like this back in the 50's called the "The Great Automatic Grammatizator." Man, I loved that story...
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Jack said 3:33PM on 1-31-2007
But does MEXICA
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