ABSTRACT
Though the diagnosis is brutally simplistic, we see three stages in the history of story generation, namely, (i) Meehan’s TALE-SPIN and the Systems that spring from a reaction to it, (ii) Turner’s MIN-STREL, and — no surprise here — (iii) a stage starting with the advent of Brutus. We believe that stage (ii), which encapsulates the view that even cases of awe-inspiring creativity are at bottom based on Standard, computable problem-solving techniques (and as such marks the natural maturation of stage (i)), will stubbornly persist for some time alongside (iii). As you will recall, we cheerfully operate under the belief that human (literary) creativity is beyond computation — and yet strive to craft the appearance of creativity from suitably configured computation. Stage (ii) is fatally flawed by the assumption that human creativity can in fact be reduced to computation. When the years tick on and on without this reduction materializing, more and more thinkers will come round to the approach Brutus is designed to usher in: that which shuns the search for such reduction in favor of clever engineering. Hollywood will want machines to co-write screenplays, even if the scientists haven’t figured out how reduce point of view to computation. (Remember Chapter 3.)
