Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
by a series of episodes, each of which consists of an event (for exam-
ple, John deciding to go visit Mary) and one or more reactions to that
event (which might include John going to the railway station). In each
episode the setting changes from one state to another, which creates the
progression of the story. And in parallel to this formal structure, which
is expressed in the “rules” for story writing, there is a set of semantic
rules which ensure that, as a story develops, the content of the various
elements of the story hold together in a meaningful and sensible way.
MINSTREL
By the early 1980s it was observed that basing stories on a highly for-
mal grammatical approach imposed strict limitations on the mechanisms
that allow a story to “work”. As a result, more emphasis in story writing
programs was placed on modelling the reasoning processes of the char-
acters. More importance was also attached to the plot of a story, for
which the work of George Polti in the early part of the twentieth cen-
tury became a foundation stone in some programs. Polti was a French
literary critic who categorised all plotlines, whether they be from French
drama, classical literature or any other genre, as falling within one of 36
primary categories, for example deliverance (which might be the rescue
of a character), getting revenge for a crime or some other dastardly deed,
or falling prey to cruelty or misfortune.
11
A similar categorisation was
developed by Vladimir Propp, who wrote an influential analysis of the
structural characteristics of Russian folk tales, which he divided into 31
generic narrative units.
In the late 1980s Scott Turner developed a program called MIN-
STREL for his PhD at UCLA. Turner's program was designed to pro-
duce 200-word stories about King Arthur and his knights of the round
table, and was modelled on various planning tasks in the storytelling
process, including the application of story themes (in the same vein as
Polti and Propp's work) and dramatic techniques and devices such as sus-
pense. Turner developed a single mechanism that enabled MINSTREL
to select the theme for a story, to maintain consistency during the story,
to instil drama into the narrative and to present the story in a linguisti-
cally acceptable form. And he endowed the program with “imagination”
by creating variations on previously known story episodes.
11
The enduring nature of Polti's work can be seen almost a century later in the plots of just about
all of today's movies.
