
The strange world of computer-generated novels - Tomte
http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/25/7276157/nanogenmo-robot-author-novel
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yzzxy
Reminds me of King James Programming - excerpts from a Markov chain trained on
the King James Bible and Abelson and Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of
Computer Programs.

[http://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/](http://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/)

    
    
        3:23 And these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, 
        and all the abominations that be done in (log n) steps.
    
        45:5 Thine arrows are sharp in the heart of man to be ruler over my people, 
        over whom I have no son to keep the procedure general, 
        we express the process in terms of a physical analogy: 
        Think of the diagram as a maze in which a marble is rolling.

~~~
avn2109
Speaking of reminders, didn't Asimov write (as happens so often now, owing to
the fact that we live in the future) a relevant short story about computer
generated prose being widely adopted?

~~~
yzzxy
I remember reading this... EDIT: found it

[http://www.oldlibrary.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov42/27382.html](http://www.oldlibrary.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov42/27382.html)

I know Asimov resisted a word processor for years, and ended up switching to
one from his typewriter and upping his revision speed a lot. Probably part of
why he had such a huge body of writing and editing work.

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therealdrag0
I think it's in the book "Automate This" [1] that there is a section about a
guy who has spent a lot of time building AI to write classical music.
Apparently people can't tell the difference, and only criticize it after
they're told it's written by a computer.

[1] [http://smile.amazon.com/Automate-This-Algorithms-Markets-
Wor...](http://smile.amazon.com/Automate-This-Algorithms-Markets-
World/dp/1591846528/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417039508&sr=8-1&keywords=automate+this)

~~~
tunesmith
I think that's defensible. I'd find the exact same sequence of pitches more
meaningful if they came from a human going through the emotional experience of
trying to write it.

~~~
solipsism
I see what you're getting it, but I think it's kind of odd. I'm curious: would
the same sequence of pitches be more or less meaningful if they came from the
brain of a specially trained dog?

~~~
jared314
> I'm curious: would the same sequence of pitches be more or less meaningful
> ...

For me, Yes. The core of the issue is that the sequence of pitches is not
meaningful on its own, like all communication. When I am listening to music,
assuming a human made it, I explore and project meaning, emotion, and thought
on to it as if expecting it to communicate something that would complete my
mental model of the artist or environment. All in an effort to feel what the
music was conveying.

If I find out it was just auto generated, I feel like a fool looking for
meaning in tea leaves.

~~~
therealdrag0
To me, it's not at all about communication. It's just experience, just like a
mountain or a sunset. My enjoyment of it isn't contingent on how it was made.

~~~
mlvljr
You are heartless

:)

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harvestmoon
Ensuring quality when you randomly generate things is hard.

I made a word generator tool. In doing so, for just 6-14 letter words, I had
to develop a large amount of quality regulation formulas that would detect
unnatural patterns ("xamxo" for instance might be a questionable pattern to
have in a word).

Anyway, the thought of coming up with a generator to make a whole book (at
least one that is coherent) is an interesting one - and much, much more
challenging.

~~~
akavel
Ah, your note reminds me of The Automated Curse Generator story on The Daily
WTF...:

[http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Automated-Curse-
Generato...](http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Automated-Curse-Generator)

~~~
harvestmoon
Fun article, thanks - gave me a good laugh!

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mpalmer
Cool stuff - and anticipated decades ago in Roald Dahl's "The Great Automatic
Grammatizator"!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatizat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatizator)

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mattxxx
The world of technology and art is amazing right now, because it's like we
just discovered linseed oil and are seeing people begin to create the first
oil paintings.

There maybe some work to make it more... relatable? or communicable?
expressible?

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tdumitrescu
Had to do a little digging to get from the article to the Github repos from
last year and this year:

[https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo](https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo)

[https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014](https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014)

Love 'generated detective':
[http://gregborenstein.com/comics/generated_detective/1/](http://gregborenstein.com/comics/generated_detective/1/)

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failrate
I find this really encouraging, as 8 to 10 years ago, I used a Markov-chain
type strategy to complete a novel for me when I didn't have time to enter
NaNoWriMo. I did a combined corpus approach with Project Gutenberg copies of
Sense and Sensibilities and Thuva, Queen of Mars. Jane Austen is far more
interesting when there's a sword fight every page.

~~~
ehurrell
It's very interesting, I've done much the same on
[http://myrobotwrites.com](http://myrobotwrites.com) except I kept the texts
generated short to keep a tumblr posting schedule :P

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cpeterso
It's interesting that some generators take a bottom-up, textual approach and
others a top-down, agent-based approach.

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divs1210
Here's a site that generates short poems from lovecraftian texts. Generates
pretty creepy stuff at times. I submitted it as a mini project at college.

[http://yushing.herokuapp.com](http://yushing.herokuapp.com)

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thomasfl
Does the novels pass the Lovelace 2.0 test?

The Lovelace 2.0 is an alternative to the Turing test. It tests the systems
capability to produce creative artefacts, like novels.

