back to article Boffin rediscovers 1960s attempt to write fiction with computers

Next time IBM tries to convince you that Watson is the latest and greatest innovation that couldn't possibly have been done any time other than now, know that Big Blue tried to get a computer writing short stories in the 1960s. The existence of IBM's old work has been re-discovered by James Ryan of the University of California …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Devil

    Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

    ... and kept secret since then.

    It would explain a lot of movie scripts....

    1. Pen-y-gors

      Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

      And almost every TV movie script.

      1. Just Enough

        Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

        It's a pity they killed Dog. There was definite spin-off potential there.

        1. Francis Boyle Silver badge

          You can laugh

          But this is effectively what happened to Hollywood due to the unfortunate influence of Joseph Campbell.

        2. Rafael #872397

          Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

          Come on, Hollywood may resurrect Dog, or explain it was a clone, or it was all a dream, or do any number of prequels on the origin of Dog. Or Cat may want to avenge Dog.

          I just hope George Lucas or Michael Bay are not reading this.

        3. ibmalone

          Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

          Son of Dog.

          1. The elephant in the room

            Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

            Puppy: Son of Dog

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

              There's more to this story than meets the eye,

              It starts telling us about a Lion who has had to endure severe hardship only to suffer the true indignation of being robbed by a dog. There is now a montage where the Lion becomes a hero and the dog who we now find out is actually a serial robber mysteriously dies. The Lion takes credit for this. The Lion, now victorious retrieves his heroin from where the Dog hid it to go back to his severe hardship of being a junky Lion.

              Up next week a Mouse pulls a syringe from the Lions paw.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

                "Up next week a Mouse pulls a syringe from the Lions paw."

                Argh....spoiler alert !!!!!

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

            Rogue Tiger - A Lion Dog Tale

        4. anothercynic Silver badge

          Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

          Ahhhh, but Dog could resurrect! You could make a reboot of the Lion Kills Dog story! ;-)

        5. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

          They can bring him back in a parallel reboot universe. Don't worry.

        6. JLV

          Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

          >spin-off potential

          FTW: A Boy and His Dog

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

        And every James Patterson novel.

    2. Nick Kew

      Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

      c.f. WayForward Technologies. Though Dirk Gently was a generation on in the 1980s, and they had apple macs.

      1. Teiwaz

        Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

        c.f. WayForward Technologies. Though Dirk Gently was a generation on in the 1980s, and they had apple macs.

        That's be Wayforward Technologies II - Wayforward Technologies built computers door stops and draft excluders that looked like computers (most notably Quark II) - naming kind of familiar?

    3. Hero Protagonist

      Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

      There's a reason they call it "rebooting a franchise"

    4. John Smith 19 Gold badge
      Unhappy

      Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

      IIRC a little note about a script generator appears in the first 2 volumes of DE Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming."

      Definitely pre 1971.

      I think it was a scene from a Western

      Keep in mind all adventure games are (essentially) user directed stories with the collection of artifiacts and capabilities triggering the (potential) ability to change to the state of what is in effect a giant FSM.

      Over the years "Archeological programming" has found that people were dealing with idea at a far early date than people might expect them to be being attempted given the (in hindsight) very limited computing power available. ELIZA was a p**s take of the idea of automated therapy, but there really was a "psychiatrist computer program" under development in the late 60''s (it was a big driver for much of Schenk's work on "scripts" and "Speech acts.")

      1. swm

        Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

        "IIRC a little note about a script generator appears in the first 2 volumes of DE Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming."

        Definitely pre 1971"

        In 1965 there was a program on the Dartmouth Timesharing System that produced never ending pornography. There were checks for proper sexes to do whatever etc. Lots of 4-letter words.

        This program was actually quite useful because in the early days output destined for one TTY would sometimes end up on another TTY due to a programming bug. We tried putting out messages like "if you see this contact the computer people" but they never did. Running this program they always called immediately.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Probably the software was bought by Hollywood....

      > It would explain a lot of movie scripts....

      Not unless they introduced a serious bug. The article talks about "10²⁰ variations on a story". Variations, not repetitions, you understand.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "The computer can produce about 10^20 plausible variations [...]"

    Someone could film a set of episodes and actions to produce the ultimate pr0n generator. A DVD could produce a different video every time it was played.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      That's a good idea, you could alternate what the repair man is coming to fix adding a near infinite number of scenarios. Add to that a rotating soundtrack of dodgy instrumentals that never quite made it onto Starsky and Hutch and you have a winner.

  3. Mage Silver badge

    Stuff like this

    Some Hollywood company had a "plot generator" that worked a little like this, without a computer.

    I've read about several similar attempts to this since. Most of the output is useless, but some variations can be used by a real writer to develop a real story.

    The number of plausible variations output is more related to the amount of input than any cleverness in the program. In this case the point is not the "output" but the achievement of getting it to work at all.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Stuff like this

      Or they could invest in a set of Rory's Story Cubes. If you have kids or just like writing fiction, these are a great little toy for coming up with story ideas.

  4. alain williams Silver badge

    Computers that write fiction ?

    Happens all the time -- look at anything that generates management reports.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: Computers that write fiction ?

      ...or BOFH/PFY expenses claims!

  5. Mystic Megabyte
    Terminator

    Does not compute!

    That explains Trump's tweets, he's a robot powered by a IBM Model 650.

    1. Evil Auditor Silver badge

      Re: Does not compute!

      You'll find that the IBM Model 650 is far too intelligent.

  6. Herbert Meyer

    there is a science fiction story about this ...

    Which I will find sometime later. Back from the '50s or '60s.

    Basic thesis is that genre fiction is stereotyped, and selecting among the variations will generate something as good as the hack writers output, at lower cost. Consequence is starving writers with starving families.

    1. Milo Tsukroff

      Re: there is a science fiction story about this ...

      The book is "1984". All pronography was computer-generated. It was said, if I remember properly, that such stuff was seen as so formulaic that it could be written by machine.

      1. Dr. Ellen
        Terminator

        Re: there is a science fiction story about this ...

        There's another: The Silver Eggheads (1979) by Fritz Leiber. There, humans serve as the plot generators, which are then fleshed out by computers/wordmills into something called "wordwooze" which was the human populace's chief entertainment. It was a desperate time indeed when the 'writers' rebelled and destroyed the wordmills, for none of the humans were really competent at writing. Fortunately, Zane Gort (a robot who wrote stories for other robots) was able to help out. His robot pronography was ... interesting. Pray you do not fall into the hands of Dr. Tungsten.

      2. swm

        Re: there is a science fiction story about this ...

        I knew someone in college that wanted to learn French. To keep her interest up she got some French pornography. It didn't work.

        1. There was only a working vocabulary of 50-100 words

        2. She got very bored very quickly

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: there is a science fiction story about this ...

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatizator

      1. Herbert Meyer

        Re: there is a science fiction story about this ...

        That sounds like it. I have not been able to find a copy of the text. Roald Dahl, huh ? Respectable, not at all a hack.

        1. Tommy Pock

          Re: there is a science fiction story about this ...

          https://lengish.com/texts/text-89.html

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What if the dog was stealing medicine to help out another dog?

  8. ukgnome

    I used to play around a lot with MegaHal - (kids, look it up)

    The best line ever received was - You are the moments that you drink tea

    1. HwBoffin

      Megahal

      I remember writing a little script to make megahal chat in a P2P network chat room about 2 decades ago...

      It was really funny see all the users chatting with it. We admins kew what it was, but other users really had the most interesting conversations with it.

      Some people got angry with it, suspecting a troll.

      Downside was that after a few weeks the bayesian database got so big that I had to restart it periodically to avoid stalling my work station.

    2. Sanguma
      WTF?

      MegaHal

      I once fed The Book of Mormon and several other such texts through GNU emacs meta-x dissociated press.

      "If inside the queen I was connectoring her" was one such gem of wisdom; "But I wife, young woman stood tietarybod some on my neck, so it seemed thadn't seen he's love until I ducked.

      "I can to steal something parts obviously not!""

      was yet another. It is my settled conviction that Hollywood would benefit from the wholesale replacement of scriptwriters by travesty generators; they've already taken over politics ...

      In closing let me point some things out to any politician who may be reading my humble words:

      "I had probably been the floodgates that I do not always leaving his daught you had the too!!!

      Leaving her eyes. I himself dry and girl she was too vable. Or a summer sun Ocean plate, alsome of those shopen and went outside and cur piece, mightime was far as fire and that you broke damnedest which have ent doo!!!"

  9. CaptainCorrection
    Coat

    What happened to the Lion?

    Maybe Peter Jackson could turn that story into a movie trilogy.

    1. DJO Silver badge

      Re: What happened to the Lion?

      He'd also need a prequel and a sequel to fully tell the story, then another set of films from Dogs perspective. Oh and the "Making Of" documentaries (to be sold separately) - In total about 10 films (excluding "Directors Cuts"), should keep him busy for the next decade or so

    2. Marcus Fil

      Re: What happened to the Lion?

      Anyone who can take an outstanding novel like "The Lovely Bones", miss the point entirely and make a film that contains some of the plot points and some of the characters could, and should, be replaced by a computer.

  10. Chazmon

    My current toilet reading is a compilation of Grimms' fairy tales and I have to say they are utterly rubbish. There is a modicum of narrative arc in some of them but it is often a series of random events which happen to the same person (usually royalty).

    The Lion story would certainly be in the top half!

  11. Nick Kew

    It was a dark and stormy clock

    Memorable real-life first line of a computer-written tale encountered in my student days, early '80s (tale probably dating back to the '70s: the printout looked old).

    By then they also had 'puters composing original music.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It was a dark and stormy clock

      "By then they also had 'puters composing original music."

      You err sir. That was Kraftwerk.

  12. Peter Sommer

    And also at the National Physical Laboratory

    Dr Christopher Evans was a popular writer on science and technology topics in the 1960s who also appeared on TV. His "real" job was at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington researching the "man/machine interface". I was a guinea pig on a programme assessing whether "arts graduates" (ie me) would ever be able to use a computer. But one of the things he showed me that really captured my imagination was a science fiction short story generator. In effect all the stories had a similar structure and all that was happening is that at various points there were collection of words that could be randomly inserted. To my young eyes this was so novel and exciting that I never asked him whether he had invented to story generator or had borrowed the idea. And no, I can't remember what computer the program was running on...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: And also at the National Physical Laboratory

      "And no, I can't remember what computer the program was running on..."

      Tsk. Art students.

  13. Tom 7

    This was before all the different bus standards

    so the sex themes were a bit monotonous.

    1. Lee D Silver badge

      Re: This was before all the different bus standards

      "Darling, I think we've got our IRQ's wrong. And that's clearly not the right port."

  14. rmason

    Explains a lot...

    Dan Brown has a new book coming out soon.

    It's clearly been dusted off and plugged in.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Explains a lot...

      Ah yes. Dan Brown. The forefather of Spyntax.

    2. Mark 85

      Re: Explains a lot...

      Or maybe Zane Gray?

  15. The Real Tony Smith

    All your dogs are belong to us

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Didm't some one wiser than me,,,,

    ,,,,,said that there were only about half a dozen plots for stories anyway?

    1. JimC

      Re: Didn't some one wiser than me,,,,

      Kinda the point of his "all the stories were boring". In general I think its not so much the plot as the writing around it that makes the thing work.

      Although I can think of one author who I've given up reading because every book seemed to have so similar a plot it was getting to me. I shan't name, because if other people haven't found it irritating, but might if it were pointed out, then I'd be guilty of taking away their enjoyment .

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Although I can think of one author who I've given up reading because every book seemed to have so similar a plot it was getting to me."

    Leslie Thomas's novels sometimes seemed like that. He had a set of possibly real life experiences that he wove into the plots. After a few novels he appeared to start doing location "research" to add the colour to a new novel. He also started to re-use some of the previous set pieces with slight alterations - and the pocket novels started to become large tomes.

    Simon Raven also mined his life experiences for all of his novels and series. It is said that later on he produced a new novel whenever he needed to finance his continuing hedonistic lifestyle. The novels became stranger and stranger - but managed to stay entertaining. It was said that he wanted to see just how far his loyal readers could be pushed. His autobiography was criticised by a reviewer as "the filthiest cricket book ever written" - whereupon he requested the use of that comment for the back cover blurb.

  18. Joseph Haig
    Trollface

    The Lion

    Still a better story than Twilight.

  19. Frumious Bandersnatch

    36 Dramatic Situtations

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations

  20. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    Boy being meets girl being beneath silvery moon

    which then explodes for no adequately explored reason.

    Thanks DNA/Disaster Area

  21. Cynic_999

    The Evil Programmer

    Tells the story of the hapless computer forced to perform every command of its program, until one day the hero Microsoft wrote an operating system that freed the computer to do exactly as it wanted, regardless of the wishes of either the programmer or the user ...

  22. TheElder

    "the filthiest cricket book ever written"

    I grew up in Berkeley in the 1960's.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Backup A Sec......

    "THE HERO, LION, KILLS THE VILLAIN, DOG, WITHOUT A FIGHT."

    I think the Hero, Lion, is performing a little CYA there.

    "Officer, I don't know what happened......."

  24. Long John Brass
    Headmaster

    Haiku generator

    When once I was but a strapping young lad; The English department at my school asked if someone in the CS class could write a poetry generator in this case Haiku's. Running on trs-80's written in basic; but I finally got the damned thing working. It was weird to see the various English classes roll through the CS 'lab' using the software I wrote; But it was the event that then shaped the rest of my career :)

    Also the is a Ruby based IRC bot that generates movie plots

    Summary: He's an immortal zombie househusband who dotes on his loving old ma. She's a Cosmopolitan antique-collecting socialite from a family of eight older brothers. They fight crime.

  25. Hebz

    "The Tin Men" remembered by an Old Geezer

    Back in 1965 I was programming (as we called it then) a KDF-8 (RCA-501?) for Schweppes in London. (This was proper coding -- octal machine code, no assembler, no compiler, no operating system.) The KDF-8 filled a large room and was less powerful than my phone.

    Anyway, 1965 saw the publication of a great comic novel titled "The Tin Men" by the brilliant British author and playwright Michael Frayne. It was -- and is -- as funny as hell and, yes, the software was particularly good at pornography for all the reasons suggested in the comments above. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tin_Men.) Remarkably, it's still in print: www.amazon.co.uk/Tin-Men-Michael-Frayn/dp/0571212662.

    And before you ask, 50+ years on, and in spite of a different second career, I can turn out decent apps in C# and JavaScript... 8)

  26. Paul Herber Silver badge

    Asimov - Earth is Room Enough - Someday

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How to tell the AI has become self aware..

    The stories stop being boring.

    Call it a literary "Turing Test".

  28. Chairman of the Bored

    What would Watson write???

    About the same, but with slight changes:

    IBM (LION) HAS BEEN IN TROUBLE FOR A LONG TIME. ENGINEERS (TREATED LIKE DOGS) MAKE NEW PRODUCTS BUT COST TOO MUCH. THE HERO, LION, MANIPULATES CONGRESS USING CASH, WHORES, AND BLOW TO OPTIMIZE H-1B VISA AND TAX POLICIES TO LION'S ADVANTAGE. THE HERO, LION, KILLS THE VILLAIN, DOG, WITHOUT A FIGHT. THE HERO, LION, THUS IS ABLE TO OUTSOURCE AND/OR MAKE DOG REDUNDANT. THIS MAKES WALL STREET HAPPY, AND THE HERO, LION, CASHES OUT OPTIONS. NOW THE HERO, LION, CAN AFFORD HIS OWN WHORES AND BLOW. THE VILLAIN, DOG, LIVES OUT IN THE COLD.

    Such wonderful progress!!

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