Automatic novel writers
Mike Sharples, Rafael Pérez y Pérez · 2022
The chapter discusses attempts to generate books by computer. In the early 1970s, Sheldon Klein, a professor of both computer science and linguistics at the University of Wisconsin, and his students designed a series of programs to generate short stories, culminating in an Automatic Novel Writer. His program generated murder mystery stories based on a computational model of language, but it never reached the stage of composing novels. Other programs during the 1980s and 1990s did result in published books. The most convincing of these was Just This Once , a 350-page romance in the style of bestselling author Jacqueline Susann. It took the program developer, Scott French, eight years to design a program that would imitate the style of this author. In 2013, the computer scientist and artist Darius Kazemi proposed an annual event, the National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo), for entrants to write computer code within one month that generates a 50,000-word novel. An outstanding example of this exercise in creative coding is The Annals of the Parrigues , a beautifully-crafted guide to an imagined ancient English kingdom, produced by Emily Short as a journey of discovery between human and computer.