Here’s a novel way to write a book
THIS concept was explored in George Orwell’s great novel 1984. The Party creates meaningless entertainment, songs and novels for the proles – all written by machines.
Fantasy became reality in 2008 when Russian author Alexander Prokopovich published True Love. To write the book, a group of software developers and philologists created the program PC Writer 1.0.
They built up profiles of the novel’s main protagonists, using characters from Tolstoy’s classic novel Anna Karenina to describe their appearance, vocabulary, psychological profile and other key characteristics.
The software incorporated the structure and style of various other novelists, i ncluding J a panese a ut hor Haruki Murakami, and the novel was ‘written’ by the computer in three days.
To briefly outline the scenario, the characters are located on an uninhabited island and all have amnesia. They know who they are but don’t remember if they’re married, have children or their relationships with each other.
It begins: ‘ “There’s nothing else here but the bloody sea and the bloody rocks . . . And it is in such a drab place that I am going to kill you,” the woman muttered.’
However, the novel is somewhat surreal and disjointed and the likes of John Banville are unlikely to feel too threatened by this literary rival.
More successful is the work of Philip M. Parker, marketing professor at INSEAD (the European Institute of Business Administration), who has patented a system that uses an algorithm to automatically compile data into book form.
He has orders for more than 900,000 books on Amazon. The books are self-published paperbacks.
Ninety-five per cent of the ordered books are sent out electronically, with the remainder reaching their readers via print on demand. The algorithm scans databases relevant to any given topic and organises data into a technical report.
Examples of books written by the program include: The 2007 Report on Little Cigarette-Size Cigars Weighing Less Than 3 Pounds Per 1,000 Cigars and The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Blepharitis.
There is a market for specific data collated in organised form. Parker believes it will eventually be able to create novels with a si mple structure such as romance novels. Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge.
QUESTION Reading Roderick Random, by Tobias Smollett, I came across the terms: tilt-boat, can of flip and salmagundy. What do they mean? FURTHER to an earlier answer, the word salmagundy lives on in Jamaican cuisine. Solomon Gundy is a fish paste of smoked herring, hot peppers and seasonings. The name of the dish dates from the 18th century and is a corruption of the British salmagundy – a mixed salad.
A. E. Everett, Southampton.