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Man vs Machine Story Writing Contest
ari{Dal} writes "Brutus.1 will challenge humans in a contest to write the best short story on the theme of betrayal. It took six years to develop at a cost of about 2 million dollars US, and writes stories based on logic, AI, math, and grammar structures. The judges will be challenged, not only to pick the best story, but also to spot the computer written one. The contest runners don't believe they'll be able to tell the difference.
"
There was an article in the May 1998 issue of MIT Technology Review which had a sample story called "Betrayal" (very original name) written by Brutus...
Here's the link: http://www.techreview.com/a rticles/ma98/bringsjord.html
Okay, within a 500-word constraint it might do well, but that's only because in a story that short there's no room for developments. I've always felt that computers would (some day) do a decent job at drabbles (stories of exactly 100 words), but anything over a couple of thousands of words is bound to be distinguishable from the work of a hume.
Of course, I try to be open as well as cynical, so I look forward to reading some of Brutus' offerings.
http://www.rpi.edu/dept/ppcs/BRUTUS /brutus.html
It's got some stories generated by the program, and other information by Selmer. (Incidentally, I've now had Selmer for three separate courses, and he is one of the absolute best professors I've had in my four years. Period.) Selmer fully believes that "true" AI is impossible, and that man is more than a machine, but has devoted his life to the study of AI anyway, and finding close approximations.
-Brian
Why do I get the distinct feeling the entry from the machine will be 'First post!'....
--
10 PRINT "IT"
...
20 PRINT "WAS"
30 PRINT "A"
40 PRINT "DARK"
50 PRINT "AND"
60 PRINT "STORMY"
70 PRINT "NIGHT"
So much to say here...
I'm one of Selmer's students in the Minds & Machines Program here at RPI, and I know there is a fundamental difference between Brutus and people. For now, that difference is creativity. Brutus was told/taught about English, much as we were, and the university setting, etc. What is different between something that I write and what Brutus.1 writes is where it comes from. I know that Brutus.1 has a limited knowledge base from which it writes, but I'm not sure I can pinpoint where these words I'm writing are coming from as my fingers type them.
I personally think that Brutus' stories are a little static, but not as bad as some of the things I've read. As a literary critic (which I'm not), I think the weakest part of the stories are consistently the endings -- for me, it leaves little sense of conclusion and zero resolution. But then again, that's just me.
For people who write about the computer writing perfect English as opposed to "normal" everyday speaking and writing with small mistakes, it's very easy to program a computer to make typos, etc.
As far as Selmer's comment about Brutus.1 not being conscious, it definitely isn't, and not because it doesn't have a body; it's because it wasn't built to be conscious. It doesn't have a cohesive grasp of stories, and I don't think it has any idea about anything around it, not does it actually understand anything about the feeling of betrayl or anything associated with it. It might know how to express it in written English, but writing about something and knowing it are two very different things indeed.
It's true that Selmer doesn't believe in Strong AI, and if you ever have the pleasure of meeting him you'll find that his arguments are clear, concise, and based perfectly on logic. My views are extrememly similar to his, and I don't believe that Strong AI is possible either; I'm resistant to what some claim is the "fact" that I'm basically a machine. However, this personal belief that Stong AI can't really work or exist is exactly what drives me to see if I can make it happen.
Well, the door was open...
It doesn't look very impressive. From the sample stories, it appears to be capable of nothing more than very short, simple stories with a very limited range.
Unless they reveal the internals, or release several hundred stories generated by the program with no human selection or input, there is no reason to believe they have accomplished anything new or interesting. It appears to me that this is a story compiler, not a story writer. The "programmers" wrote the facts of the story and the computer compiled it into a linear story of a fixed format written in English:
-detailed view of betrayed
-establishment of trust
-opportunity for betrayal
-initiation of betrayal event (but not the complex details of the confrontation that would ensue)
-short view of betrayer afterwards
There may be an ad-libbing function too that generates variations from combining random selections from lists, but this can hardly be called AI.
The sample stories show no motivation of any sort. They are nonsense stories. There is no character more easy to write about than a madman, because his actions don't need to be logical.
The exception is the self-betrayal story, which displays a very simple motivation (if that's even the right word): the betrayer/betrayed hates what he has to do and freezes in the middle of it. With such a small sample, there's no reason to assume anything but that the program can produce no other motivation.
BTW, does anyone doubt that the AOL community can produce lifeless prose indistinguishable from that which a program can create? I've taken a few minutes to identify bots in chats before, but only because I've had equally lame conversations with people who have nothing worth saying, are often distracted because they're doing five other things with their computer at the same time, commonly only want to talk about one very specific thing, and sometimes don't know English very well. Any humans can seem like a bot with sufficient limitations on the interaction.
In summary, it looks like this costs a lot more effort than it pays back. It takes immense human effort to produce short stories of very limited range in an apparently fixed format. The creativity displayed here is human, and a human using this tool could not compete with a professional author spending the same effort. While it might be able to produce hundreds of stories from a single input, nobody would want to read them all because they would all be the same story underneath.
Many enraged psychiatrists are inciting a weary butcher. The butcher is weary and tired because he has cut meat and steak and lamb for hours and weeks. He does not desire to chant about anything with raving psychiatrists, but he sings about his gingivectomist, he dreams about a single cosmologist, he thinks about his dog. The dog is named Herbert.
I sincerely hope Brutus will do better than that, and show how much technology/+programming have advanced in 12 years.
(For a demonstration of actual rather than artificial insanity, check out the article's last sentence: "If the computer wins the contest, I'm going to take my computer and burn it. I certainly hope a human wins." Sigh. Did the Wright brothers burn their plane right after Kitty Hawk?)
Give a monkey a brain and he'll swear he's the center of the universe.
Will Shakespear was an abacus.
This has pretty good ramifications for gaming, role playing games that make their own plots 10 years down the track.
Don't they already use a computer to write the plot for Ally Mcbeal tho?
for n in every_male_in_show
act_like_scum(males(n))
unique court case = random element of ally's life
court_winnter = woman
insert frigging annoying dancing baby
have ally walk down street to random song in ally sound track.
It's turtles all the way down.
If you could make a computer complex enough so it could emulate a human brain with all its neurons and currents, they could be a friend or make your day brighter, because they would be exactly like a real human. Its thinking and feeling would be as artifical as yours - after all, all we think our emotions are is a bunch of electrical currents flowing around our brain. As long as you don't believe in some higher instance (for example, God), it is possible to build a computer that's indistinguishable from a human - in every aspect. In its highest form of complexity, it *would* be a human because it would have the same molecules in the same spot as a naturally-born human would have. :-)
Yeah, score this down as "heathen"
Since the novel is very short and has very precise themes, we are still in the field of mathematical games - that is, arranging a finite number of element according to a finite set of rule in order to reach an arbitrary kind of configuration.
It is evident that computers are intrinsically better than humans at mathematical games stricto sensu. I don't understand why some people were so shocked after Deep Blue's victory over Kasparov. The real miracle is that men are still able to compete with computers today ! This is merely a matter of time before we can get machines powerful enough to calculate and try the entire tree of a game (or, for more complex games, significant parts of it) and be almost sure to win.
By design, machines are better than human at mathematical games. Chess are a mathematical game. Writing a very short story on a precise subject can still be roughly modelled as a mathematical game, at least for the structure of the story, while the "creative sugar" may be a difficult bit. Writing a full novel with complex stories and deep, meaningful dialogues is beyond that reach.
The problem is, are there still many people who actually read complex stories - especially with deep, meaningful dialogues ? This Brutus-1 computer is just a machine equivalent for Barbara Cartland or industrial pop-music songwriters. CACDBS - Computer-Aided Celine Dion BullShit - is only years away.
You see, this is a little like Babelfish : on its own, it's useless (too buggy), but used as a "preparser" to do the bulk of the job so the humans only have to correct the errors and add little twists every here and there, it can drastically enhance productivity. My opinion is, it will be very successful in America.
(This is not an attempt at US-bashing : I'm sure the books it'll write will have tremendous success even in Europe - simply, european editors might be more reluctant to adopt this machine than their american counterparts. Damn intellectuals. Still don't understand the market is always right)
Thomas
> I find it interesting that someone with enough know-how to co-create the computer, Brutus.1, would have such a limited mindset. My dog doesn't have a human body, but I'm reasonably sure that it's conscious.
To pursue the idea a bit further... The Scientific American article mentioned that Edward Teller is missing a foot due to a streetcar accident in 1928. Is he therefore less conscious than someone with two feet? How much of a human body is required? Would a single atom suffice? Two? 32767?
Is a fat man more conscious than a thin man?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You know, Isaac Asimov wrote a short story about this some years ago. I remember reading it in grade school. An author had a robot that did chores and such and followed the three lessons of robotics (Asimov's rules). Well the author kept paying a technician to upgrade the robot, first with grammatics, then a better dictionary, then "senses" such as irony and etc. Well to make things more interesting as time went on the robot would create better and better stories till one of them was good enough to cause the author to want to shut the robot off. The story ends like this: The robot kills the author and runs off with the technician. This is all too scary for me really. I mean how many of Asimov's predictions have already come true?
Words are a means of self expression. Giving a machine the power to express itself in words is just one more step in producing true AI. So kudos to the programmers and engineers.
Just one more thought, the robots final story pitted two colleges against each other: one from Yule (Yale) and another from Harvard. Anyway please make all the corrections necessary to my poor recollection of the story.
Bortbox01