8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
a lot of talk!, April 25, 2000
By A Customer
Basically the book contains only one chapter worth reading. The rest of the book contains unuseful definitions, such as definitions of creativity. Basically, I think most of the questions addressed in the book about creativity, etc. are irrelevant to whether the computers can tell a story or not. Finally, chapter 6 describes the system. It has to be said, the chapter was very clear and the discussion of the implementation of the system was well laid out.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A prelude to automated novel writing., March 6, 2004
This review is from: Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, A Storytelling Machine (Hardcover)
Machines that can summarize documents are commonplace, as well as machines that can extract words and lines from paragraphs and rearrange them to possibly form something useful or interesting. But can a machine write a short story, or even a full-fledged novel with complex characters and themes? That such ability is not only possible for machines but is actually present in some of them is the subject of this book, and if one ignores the philosophical rhetoric on the "strong AI" problem, the authors give a fine overview of their project to create a "story-telling machine", which they have designated as BRUTUS.
The authors claim that their book "marks the marriage of logic and creativity", a claim that will raise the eyebrows of many a philosopher, literary critic, or novelist. But the intuitive dissonance that many in these professions may have regarding the reduction of the free-play of the imagination to the rigors and organization of logic should not dissuade others from believing that such a reduction is not only possible, but has actually been accomplished. Ironically, the authors early in the book assert that there are no examples of machine creativity in the world. Of course, this assertion depends on one's notion of what creativity is, and to what degree this creativity may have depended on the assistance of machines. Machines that create new mathematics, scientific theories, music, or novels do not yet exist, the authors claim, but they do take pains to express their optimism regarding future developments in "machine creativity".
The authors are incorrect in their belief that there are no machines now that can currently develop new and interesting results in a wide variety of different domains. In addition, their notion of intelligence is too anthropomorphic, too tied to what human intelligence is, or is not (and one could argue that machine intelligence is even better understood than human intelligence). The authors though have written a book that gives the reader much insight into what is involved in building creative, thinking machines. Most refreshingly, the authors do not want to settle the question of machine creativity from the comfort of their armchairs, but instead from the laboratory by actually building artificial authors. Philosophical speculation is for the most part eschewed, and is replaced by the rigors and sometimes frustrations of laboratory experiments.
According to the authors, BRUTUS exhibits "weak" creativity rather than "strong", with the latter being compared to the creation ex nihilo, examples of this being non-Euclidean geometry and the Cantor diagonalization method from mathematics. Weak creativity on the other hand, is a more practical notion, and according to the authors is rooted in the "operational" one developed by psychologists. In the development of BRUTUS, the authors wanted to create an automated story generator that satisfied seven requirements: 1. The machine must be competitive with the requirements of strong creativity. 2. The machine must be able to generate imagery in the mind of the reader. 3. The machine must produce stories in a "landscape of consciousness." 4. The machine must be capable of formalizing the concepts at the core of "belletristic" fiction, with the example of "betrayal" being emphasized the most by the authors. 5. The machine must be able to generate stories that a human would find interesting. 6. The machine must be in command of story structures that will give it "immediate standing" in the human audience. 7. The prose developed by the machine must be rich and compelling, not "mechanical". BRUTUS they say meets all of these requirements, but no doubt some critics will think otherwise. The authors do make a sound case for their assertions that it does, and it is the belief of this reviewer that they have, and that BRUTUS is one of first automated story generators. With optimism toward the future developments of BRUTUS and artificial intelligence in general, they state that "a machine able to write a full, formidable novel, or compose a feature-length film, or create and manage the unfolding story in an online game, would be, we suspect, pure gold. "
They are right.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
A few useful ideas, lots of hype, October 18, 2005
This review is from: Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, A Storytelling Machine (Hardcover)
This book discusses the issue of computer programs that can generate stories, with particular emphasis on a program which the authors claim can do so.
The first part of the book discusses philosophical issues regarding artificial intelligence, in attempt to answer the question, Can a computer generate stories which are indistinguishable from human-written stories.
One can see why the authors make modest claims here: if one examines carefully the algorithm presented in the second half of the book, one notices that at certain strategic points the program needs "help," i.e. human intervention. So, humans still have to do the hard part; without this, the program fails. The program can only do the "easy" parts.
Notwithstanding this and the hypey technobabble that permeates the book, this book does present useful research and references on the parts of storytelling that can be automated at the present time, which are significant.
From the back cover: "Computers can play superlative chess, diagnose disease, guide spacecraft, power robots that can deliver mail and (soon) clean hoses, etcetera. But can computers 'originate' anything? Can computers be genuinely creative? This is the toughest question that those sanguine about AI face. This book reports on a multi-year attempt to engineer a blueprint (BRUTUS) for a computer system that can hold its own against literarily creative humans, and on the first incarnation of that blueprint (BRUTUS.1)."
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