dreamer@diku.dk (Thomas Magle Brodersen) (04/18/91)
jclose@potomac.ads.com (Jeff Close) writes: >Does anyone know of (or have) any code for a story-generating program? >It doesn't have to be too complex -- I'm thinking of something like >the old "Talespin" program. If possible please reply through EMAIL. >------------------------------------v------------------------------------- Please let me know too, as I am very interested in the subject. - Thomas M. Brodersen -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ ! For the memories of a lifetime: : Thomas Magle Brodersen ! ! Rekall! Rekall! Rekall! : alias dreamer@diku.dk ! +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
srt@aero.org (Scott "TCB" Turner) (04/23/91)
I'm currently working on a program called MINSTREL that tells theme-based stories about King Arthur and his Knights. However, it is not available for distribution. The difficulty with storytelling is the scope of the problem. To tell a *consistent* story you must do quite a bit of world-modelling. To tell an *interesting* story you must do writing goals such as theme, suspense, character development, etc. To tell a *novel* story, you must do creativity. Each of these tasks in itself is a very difficult problem. MINSTREL addresses all of these issues, and is currently about 12K lines of Lisp code, built on top of a tools package of similar size. And while I understand what MINSTREL does, I doubt that anyone else could understand the code in its entirety. It simply isn't well documented or organized. I may at some point write a simplified version of MINSTREL for distribution, but that's fairly low on my priority list. If you're interested in dabbling in storytelling, I'd suggest beginning from Lebowitz's UNIVERSE work. There's a paper on it in the 1985 Cog Sci Proceedings. I don't think UNIVERSE has much cognitive validity, but it is a simple framework that can be implemented quickly and will allow you to begin playing with some of the issues in storytelling. -- Scott Turner