Brute source: Computer-generated fiction

Thanks -- at least I think so -- to Daniel Akst for notifying us that computers are writing "brief outbursts of fiction that are probably superior what many humans could turn out."

If you can get through the explanatory jargon at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Brutus.1 website or the StoryBook project at North Carolina State University, you may find yourself astounded at the innovative scientific thinking that produces such readable --even graceful --prose. Conversely, you may feel disspirited at the prospect of computers someday producing "literature" worthy of nomination for the National Book Award. (Unknown human authors already achieve that distinction; why not pseudonymous Macs or PCs?)

At the moment, I'm immersed in a study of information overload.  So what most caught my attention in Akst's essay was his exploration of just how likely it is -- or isn't -- that computers will produce great literature by dint of considering "every possible alternative in a world without end."

Not to worry.  The current state of cognitive science suggests that computers won't be writing great fiction any time soon. Like humans, computers are constrained by enormous amounts of available  information with limited time to process it.  And, like humans, computers must ultimately resort to satisficing.

Satisficing, a concept developed in the 1950s by Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, means settling for a good enough outcome, instead of searching endlessly for the perfect one.  This notion piqued Akst's interest in computer-generated fiction. (Perhaps he may have stumbled across Barry Schwartz's recent  book, The Paradox of Choice, an exploration of "the tyranny of overwhelming choices" that draws heavily on Simon's ideas about satisficing and its futile opposite, maximizing.)

Akst wondered if computers might be exempt from the working novelist's practical need to follow an idea "without pausing to systematically consider every [possible] plot twist, character or phrase." As it turns out, even computers "cannot create narratives by using brute computational force to mindlessly try every alternative." The online Monkey Shakespeare Simulator graphically disproves the old saw about monkeys, typewriters, and the Bard.

One useful definition of information is a stimulus or message that reduces uncertainty. Just as it is impossible for novelists to consider every possible alternative in the process of creating literature, it is impossible for any of us Info Age denizens to consider every available message in the process of reducing uncertainty.

New print and electronic information (in the standard units of measurement employed by computer scientists) is growing at the rate of 30 percent per year. In many people's experience, far from reducing uncertainty, this explosion of new messages creates information overload, causing information anxiety that increases stress and inhibits decision-making.

So, Daniel Akst, "writers and computers" are not the only ones locked in "an enduringly dysfunctional embrace." The rest of us are, as well, whether we spend our days online or float more passively in the informational floodplain.  And we all need practical and psychological ways to cope.