Method and system for automatic computation creativity and specifically for story generation

Abstract

A computer-implemented method (and system) of automatically generating a story, includes selecting a theme of the story, examining elements of the theme and instantiating the theme, and using the theme to select and control other aspects of the story.

Description

[0001]The present application is a Continuation Application of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09 / 471,689, which was filed on Dec. 23, 1999.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]1. Field of the Invention[0003]The present invention relates to a computer system, and more particularly to a computer system and method for generating a plurality of artifacts in a specified language which people (e.g., humans) are likely to find interesting.[0004]2. Description of the Related Art[0005]The notion of general creativity, like intelligence, is ultimately a humanistic and subjective concept. Moreover, the notion of computational creativity is not bound to the same procedural attributes one might associate with human creativity.[0006]Indeed, the procedural attributes of human creativity may remain largely a mystery, while the procedural attributes of computational creativity may be well-defined. This comparison is akin to the comparison between the human intelligence at work playing a game of chess ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

The present invention provides a method and system for automatically generating a story by selecting a theme, examining elements of the theme, and instantiating the theme. The system uses a creative agent that begins with a seed of interestingness and maintains the theme in generating skillful variations that are sufficiently distinct from the input. The invention integrates knowledge sources and makes the theme the critical aspect of the story generation, regardless of plot, characters, language, and story structure. The invention allows for wide variability in the other aspects of the story generation around the same theme and capturing / representing literary devices and techniques to evoke certain emotions from the reader. The invention uses the theme and is captured independently to maintain a creative distance between the input and the output and provide interestingness to the story.

Problems solved by technology

However, the procedural attributes of the human remain largely ill-defined, while the procedural mechanisms used by the computer may be rigorously explicated in a formal computational language and ultimately vary significantly from the human mechanism.

Computational creativity does not address genius.

For example, if an agent for story generation requires a complete story as an input and outputs different stories differing from the input only by the names of the characters, then the agent, while legitimately generating a unique artifact, would not be considered creative.

Indeed, the “distance” between the input and the output would be considered negligible and insufficient.

Nor would the artifact produced by the agent effect significant human interest in light of the input.

Thus, the conventional story generation system has been deficient in a number of areas as briefly discussed above.

However, these knowledge sources have neither been integrated and related to cooperative roles of an overall system architecture for story generation, nor of a more general architecture for computational creativity.

However, a problem is that sometimes a character's striving for a goal is tedious.

However, the results have lacked a thematic anchor, and therefore struggled with the notion of “interestingness”.

Story structure is part of an explicit architecture, and thus cannot be easily expressed or varied.

Further drawbacks include no representation or process for producing interestingness, no representation or process for structure expansion, and no representation or process of identifying and exploiting impressionistic knowledge.

However, in this approach it becomes extremely difficult to represent the complex plot and literary variations in the declarative forms required by story grammars.

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