What Happens When an Algorithm Helps Write Science Fiction…? Two researchers named Adam Hammond and Julian Brooke have spent the past few years developing software that analyzes literary databases. Their program can identify dozens of structural and stylistic details in huge chunks of text, and if you give them a collection of great stories—stories that maybe you wished you had written—they are able to identify all the details that those great stories have in common.
That’s where I come in: I write stories for a living. (My last one was about werewolf billionaires. It was fiction.) And I’ve watched technology infiltrate countless trades and crafts, oftentimes improving how people do their jobs, all while passing storytellers by.
Where’s the technology that can make me better at my job? Where’s the computational system that will optimize my prose? Hammond and Brooke agreed to collaborate with me on a simple experiment: Can an algorithm help me write a better story? I began by giving them a collection of my 50 favorite sci-fi stories—a mix of golden-age classics and… Read the article ‘What Happens When an Algorithm Helps Write Science Fiction’ at Wired.
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Science fiction (often shortened to SF or sci-fi) is a genre of speculative fiction, typically dealing with imaginative concepts such as futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, faster than light travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life. Science fiction often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations, and has been called a “literature of ideas”. It usually avoids the supernatural, unlike the related genre of fantasy. Historically, science-fiction stories were intended to have a grounding in actual science, but this connection is now only expected of hard science fiction. Read more at Wikipedia.
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