A Computer Won Jeopardy, But Can a Computer Write Literature?

slate.com:

Around this time last year, I reviewed Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey. The conceit of the novel is that it's actually a translation of 44 variations on The Odyssey that have been discovered on an ancient papyrus.

Read the whole story: slate.com

Comments

[MTGradwell]

06:10 PM on 02/19/2011

Can a computer write literature? Maybe it can, maybe it can't, but you're hardly likely to find out by looking at the "Lost Books". There's no attempt to get one to write literature, or to write anything. Instead, one was asked to select an order for 44 stories, each of which was self-contained. You could do that by drawing balls one at a time from a bag of 44 numbered balls, or by writing a program which emulates such a process. The result might be considered inspired by some, and dismal by others, but in any case the only creative process was the one put into the writing of the stories, by a human.

OK, so the computer attempted to put thematically similar stories together. However, it could do this because the stories had been helpfully tagged, again by a human. It didn't have to look at the stories themselves, only at the tags. And presumably it did a good job at that task, since "simulated annealing", which the program used, is a fairly simple process which usually does a good job. The only "problem" is that the author decided that lumping similar stories together wasn't what he wanted after all, and he couldn't be bothered to write a program that actually did do what he wanted, and why should he? "I try to alternate long and short chapters", he says. A computer could do that admirably, but so can a human with the chapters printed out on paper.