Artificial Intelligence and Automatic Scripting - Text 2
Until quite recently, this field of study oscillated between fundamental research and experimental art, without truly influencing the main sites for producing and consuming fiction. Even the most sophisticated systems cannot compete with “handmade” scripting. The emergence and democratization of video games, however, would change this state of affairs by creating a context for applying the automatic generation of narrative. “Live” adaptation of narrative to the player’s actions is a fantasy of video games (embodied by the holodeck in the television series Star Trek); achieving this necessarily passes through methods for automatic scriptwriting. In the following pages, we will take up the main approaches which have been adopted to attack this thorny problem.
Random Combinations and Non-contextual Grammars
The simplest method for producing new texts aromatically is to haphazardly replace certain elements within a fixed structure. A classic example of this approach is the book A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems by Raymond Queneau, published in 1961, which makes it possible to produce as many unique sonnets as indicated in the book’s title by means of replacing lines of poetry with others which meet the same criteria (rhyme and metre).
