Monkeys & Typewriters

Introduction

A Brief History of Print

The End of Books

Hypertext

What Is The Book?

The Novel Is Dead

This Is Not Science Fiction

Monkeys & Typewriters

In Defense of The E-Book

Conclusion

References

The end of books?

Easy right? It’s obvious that number two was written by a computer. The prose in the first paragraph consists of simple subject/verb/object sentence structures and lacks style whereas the second paragraph has more sentence variation and sensory imagery. Well, guess what? They were both written by computer programs.

The first is the work of the program Brutus.1 developed by Selmer Bringsjord of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and David Ferucci of I.B.M. The second was composed by Storybook, “an end-to-end narrative prose generation system that utilizes narrative planning, sentence planning, a discourse history, lexical choice, revision, a full-scale lexicon and the well-known Fuf/Surge surface realizer.” (Incidentally, that description was not written by a computer, but by Charles B. Callaway and James C. Lester, the creators of Storybook.)

Despite these technological advances, authors have little to fear in terms of job security, at least where computers are concerned. The technology previewed in Akst's article is now already five years old and yet there remain authors aplenty. That computers will one day write novels is entirely possible; whether they will be any good is another matter. Nevertheless, those familiar with the old saying that a group of monkeys banging away on typewriters will eventually produce great works of literature will enjoy taking a minute to peruse the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator.

Tara Stephens
School of Library and Information Sciences