7 ms·

> writing a novel The engineer in me has pondered writing a program that generates novels using sample data from roughly 10,000 popular novels, and generating

> writing a novel The engineer in me has pondered writing a program that generates novels using sample data from roughly 10,000 popular novels, and generating a plot algorithmically, with syntax, choice of wording, and character development all done with code.

dtagames 4y ago
It can't be done. No computer will ever create a story plot with a novel idea, and by novel I mean "new." No computer can ever do anything new and this is by design, since they only operate on programmed instructions. Any book or painting or music by a computer is only the output of preexisting code and contains nothing that isn't already in the code or data supplied to it.
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  I disagree. We have heard that "no computer will ever X" before, some time ago it was chess, then it was GO. As Lee Sedol himself said, some of the moves were very creative. What is creativity if not an affinity for lower probability actions that pass filtering mechanisms? Novelty can even be trained for and we have created agents that seek novelty. > Any book or painting or music by a computer is only the output of preexisting code and contains nothing that isn't already in the code or data supplied to it. The source code of a neural network is both its architecture, and its parameters which can keep changing with minimal interaction from the programmer as the model interacts with the world and learns from experiences. I'd be very careful to avoid claims such as those.
  - sysadm1n 4y ago
    > Novelty can even be trained for and we have created agents that seek novelty I was thinking that too. Instead of merely copying writing styles by authors, it would be possible for a program to dream up new writing styles, and generate idiosyncrasies algortihmically. We can reverse engineer novels and find out their structure and idiosyncrasies, but having the ability to create new idiosyncrasies would be the magic sauce needed to generate novels on demand.
    - dtagames 4y ago
      Where would novelty come from, since all code has to be written in advance? Even code that writes code must be written in advance. The ability to make something truly new is a unique quality of people, not shared by machines.
      - krapp 4y ago
        People don't make anything "truly new," they extrapolate from similar information they already have and build on what they know through association or translation, which is what machines can also do. No one who has never even seen an internal combustion engine is going to spontaneously invent a better one, regardless of how brilliant they are.
        dtagames 4y ago
        Wasn't the first internal combustion truly new? And the first computer? And the telegraph, etc? If they are just examples of a better something, what was the something?
        PartiallyTyped 4y ago
        No, they were not truly "new". The first "computer" was very different to what we have now. An actually novel idea was Einstein's General Relativity, but even that built on top of Riemannian geometry, which built on top of other ideas. Another actually novel idea was the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and that needed Heisenberg to sit in a park and observe a person going under lights and then back into darkness. There are very few truly novel ideas in history, and even those built on top of other works.
        krapp 4y ago
        Everything you listed was based on existing knowledge and prior technology, sometimes combined from various sources in novel ways, but that isn't "truly new." Functionally, internal combustion engines are better steam engines, computers are better abacuses and telegraphs are better war drums and smoke signals. But none of them came fully formed and realized out of thin air. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_internal_combustion_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_internal_combus... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_telegraph#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_telegraph#History
  - dtagames 4y ago
    But every possible chess move can be defined in advance, and therefore no "new" chess moves can be created. This is true of any endeavor which has fixed constraints -- which means all software code! The miracle of humans, to put it colorfully, is that we can truly devise new information which never existed before -- not in any program or algorithm. We can make things possible which were not possible in a previous paradigm. This cannot be done in software, no matter how cleverly coded, for the software is always written with the information already in mind and already planned for.
    - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
      I disagree, a document is merely a sequence of characters that humans assign meaning to. There is nothing special about them. What makes a document special is the meaning that the reader gives as a consequence of their experiences. Your comment has been found in the library of babel[1] approximately ~10^29 times, here[2] is an instance of it, character for character. [1] https://libraryofbabel.info/search.html https://libraryofbabel.info/search.html [2] https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?mafkjhh,kw_fssarehekqehl194 https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?mafkjhh,kw_fssarehe...
      - dtagames 4y ago
        Well, that's certainly an interesting algorithm I hadn't seen before. But code that can reconstruct a pasted paragraph from an existing table of letters isn't proof that my sentence already existed. Quite the opposite. It's just decomposition of something that humans created into smaller, discrete parts and then indexing those relationships. This is something software is very good at. It is not invention or novelty in the way I'm describing them. It's hard to imagine one could have a philosophical disagreement about whether humans invent things and machines don't... but perhaps that's what we have! :-)
        PartiallyTyped 4y ago
        If I find a seed such that my algorithm reconstructs your comment, has your comment already existed and you just discovered it? How is your brain anything different to a machine that given some seed (i.e. a state) produces a sequence of characters?
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago
  The brain IS a computer.

dtagames 4y ago

It can't be done. No computer will ever create a story plot with a novel idea, and by novel I mean "new." No computer can ever do anything new and this is by design, since they only operate on programmed instructions. Any book or painting or music by a computer is only the output of preexisting code and contains nothing that isn't already in the code or data supplied to it.

PartiallyTyped 4y ago
I disagree. We have heard that "no computer will ever X" before, some time ago it was chess, then it was GO. As Lee Sedol himself said, some of the moves were very creative. What is creativity if not an affinity for lower probability actions that pass filtering mechanisms? Novelty can even be trained for and we have created agents that seek novelty. > Any book or painting or music by a computer is only the output of preexisting code and contains nothing that isn't already in the code or data supplied to it. The source code of a neural network is both its architecture, and its parameters which can keep changing with minimal interaction from the programmer as the model interacts with the world and learns from experiences. I'd be very careful to avoid claims such as those.
- sysadm1n 4y ago
  > Novelty can even be trained for and we have created agents that seek novelty I was thinking that too. Instead of merely copying writing styles by authors, it would be possible for a program to dream up new writing styles, and generate idiosyncrasies algortihmically. We can reverse engineer novels and find out their structure and idiosyncrasies, but having the ability to create new idiosyncrasies would be the magic sauce needed to generate novels on demand.
  - dtagames 4y ago
    Where would novelty come from, since all code has to be written in advance? Even code that writes code must be written in advance. The ability to make something truly new is a unique quality of people, not shared by machines.
    - krapp 4y ago
      People don't make anything "truly new," they extrapolate from similar information they already have and build on what they know through association or translation, which is what machines can also do. No one who has never even seen an internal combustion engine is going to spontaneously invent a better one, regardless of how brilliant they are.
      - dtagames 4y ago
        Wasn't the first internal combustion truly new? And the first computer? And the telegraph, etc? If they are just examples of a better something, what was the something?
        PartiallyTyped 4y ago
        No, they were not truly "new". The first "computer" was very different to what we have now. An actually novel idea was Einstein's General Relativity, but even that built on top of Riemannian geometry, which built on top of other ideas. Another actually novel idea was the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and that needed Heisenberg to sit in a park and observe a person going under lights and then back into darkness. There are very few truly novel ideas in history, and even those built on top of other works.
        krapp 4y ago
        Everything you listed was based on existing knowledge and prior technology, sometimes combined from various sources in novel ways, but that isn't "truly new." Functionally, internal combustion engines are better steam engines, computers are better abacuses and telegraphs are better war drums and smoke signals. But none of them came fully formed and realized out of thin air. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_internal_combustion_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_internal_combus... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_telegraph#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_telegraph#History
- dtagames 4y ago
  But every possible chess move can be defined in advance, and therefore no "new" chess moves can be created. This is true of any endeavor which has fixed constraints -- which means all software code! The miracle of humans, to put it colorfully, is that we can truly devise new information which never existed before -- not in any program or algorithm. We can make things possible which were not possible in a previous paradigm. This cannot be done in software, no matter how cleverly coded, for the software is always written with the information already in mind and already planned for.
  - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    I disagree, a document is merely a sequence of characters that humans assign meaning to. There is nothing special about them. What makes a document special is the meaning that the reader gives as a consequence of their experiences. Your comment has been found in the library of babel[1] approximately ~10^29 times, here[2] is an instance of it, character for character. [1] https://libraryofbabel.info/search.html https://libraryofbabel.info/search.html [2] https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?mafkjhh,kw_fssarehekqehl194 https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?mafkjhh,kw_fssarehe...
    - dtagames 4y ago
      Well, that's certainly an interesting algorithm I hadn't seen before. But code that can reconstruct a pasted paragraph from an existing table of letters isn't proof that my sentence already existed. Quite the opposite. It's just decomposition of something that humans created into smaller, discrete parts and then indexing those relationships. This is something software is very good at. It is not invention or novelty in the way I'm describing them. It's hard to imagine one could have a philosophical disagreement about whether humans invent things and machines don't... but perhaps that's what we have! :-)
      - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
        If I find a seed such that my algorithm reconstructs your comment, has your comment already existed and you just discovered it? How is your brain anything different to a machine that given some seed (i.e. a state) produces a sequence of characters?
shrimp_emoji 4y ago
The brain IS a computer.