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From: srt@aero.org (Scott "TCB" Turner)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Story-Generator
Message-ID: <1991Apr23.163725.13216@aero.org>
Date: 23 Apr 91 16:37:25 GMT
References: <1991Apr9.145424.18012@potomac.ads.com> <1991Apr18.100119.18361@odin.diku.dk>
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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