

The moral storytelling system - dzink
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/06/computer-programmed-to-write-fables-moral-storytelling-system

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earljwagner
Tale-Spin was a earlier system that generated stories with morals:

"In Tale-Spin‘s case, the processes simulate character reasoning and behavior,
while the data defines a virtual world inhabited by the characters. As a
result, while altering one page of a Choose Your Own Adventure leaves most of
its story material unchanged, altering one behavior rule or fact about the
world can lead to wildly different Tale-Spin fictions." from:
[http://grandtextauto.org/2006/09/13/the-story-of-meehans-
tal...](http://grandtextauto.org/2006/09/13/the-story-of-meehans-tale-spin/)

"'How do you make it interesting?' asks Meehan(1976). 'You fix it in advance.
You rig the world so that if people do behave rationally they'll do some
interesting things... It models a writer who has something in mind that he
wants to tell a story about... This is TALE-SPIN's mode 3.'

Mode 3 of TALE-SPIN is called the AESOP-FABLE GENERATOR. An example is the
generation of 'The Fox and the Crow' with the moral 'Never trust...': 'We
predict that A has some goal which requires that B be kindly disposed towards
A, so A says something nice to B, B reacts accordingly, something happens
which causes A to achieve his goal and also causes B to suffer.'"
[http://www.intellectbooks.com/masoud/author/story/story-2.ht...](http://www.intellectbooks.com/masoud/author/story/story-2.htm)

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mcphage
> "For example, if Bob gives Alice an apple, Alice will have the apple, and
> Bob will not. To a person, that's obvious, and doesn't require explanation.

Definitely. And yet, in the produced story, we have:

> "One summer's morning the fairy stole the sword from the knight. As a
> result, the knight didn't have the sword anymore."

So you tell us that it's a fact that the reader automatically understands, and
yet when it creates stories, you have it explicitly state that. Huh?

