Lessons Learned From a Rational Reconstruction of Minstrel

Scott Turner's 1993 Minstrel system was a high water mark in story generation, harnessing the concept of imaginative recall to generate creative stories. Using case based reasoning and an author level planning system, Minstrel models human creative processes. However, the algorithmic and representational commitments made in Minstrel were never subject to principled and quantitative analysis. By rationally reconstructing Minstrel, we are able to investigate Turner's computational model of creativity and learn new lessons about his architecture. We find that Minstrel's original performance was tied to a well groomed case library, but by modifying several components of the algorithm we can create a more general version which can construct stories using a sparser and less structured case library. Through a rational reconstruction of Minstrel, we both learn new architectural and algorithmic lessons about Minstrel's computational model of creativity as well as make his architecture available to the contemporary research community for further experimentation.

[1]  E. Mueller.  Daydreaming in humans and machines : a computer model of the stream of thought , 1990 .

[2]  Derek Partridge,et al.  The foundation of artificial intelligence---a sourcebook , 1990 .

[3]  Raquel Hervás,et al.  Story plot generation based on CBR , 2004, Knowl. Based Syst..

[4]  Pat Langley,et al.  Learning Context-Free Grammars with a Simplicity Bias , 2000, ECML.

[5]  Douglas B. Lenat,et al.  AM, an artificial intelligence approach to discovery in mathematics as heuristic search , 1976 .

[6]  Graeme D. Ritchie.  A Rational Reconstruction Of The Proteus Sentence Planner , 1984, COLING.

[7]  M. Boden.  Dimensions of creativity , 1996 .

[8]  Carl Vogel,et al.  Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics , 1996, COLING 1996.

[9]  Federico Peinado,et al.  Minstrel Reloaded: From the Magic of Lisp to the Formal Semantics of OWL , 2006, TIDSE.

[10]  Graeme Ritchie,et al.  Some Empirical Criteria for Attributing Creativity to a Computer Program , 2007, Minds and Machines.

[11]  David D. Mcdonald.  A Rational Reconstruction of Genaro , 1999 .

[12]  S. Turner.  Minstrel: a computer model of creativity and storytelling , 1993 .

[13]  Michael Lebowitz,et al.  Story-telling as planning and learning , 1985 .

[14]  Patrick Olivier,et al.  The foundations of artificial intelligence: A sourcebook , 2004, Machine Translation.

[15]  Vladimir Propp,et al.  Morphology of the folktale , 1959 .

[16]  Derek Partridge.  A new guide to artificial intelligence , 1991, Ablex series in computational science.

[17]  Padraig Cunningham,et al.  A Multiplayer Case Based Story Engine , 2003, GAME-ON.

[18]  G. Ritchie.  Assessing Creativity , 2001 .

[19]  Terri Gullickson.  The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms. , 1995 .

[20]  James R. Meehan,et al.  TALE-SPIN, An Interactive Program that Writes Stories , 1977, IJCAI.

[21]  Janet L. Kolodner,et al.  Understanding Creativity: A Case-Based Approach , 1993, EWCBR.

[22]  M. Boden.  The creative mind : myths & mechanisms , 1991 .

[23]  Stephanie W. Haas.  The Creative Process: A Computer Model of Storytelling and Creativity, by Scott R. Turner , 1996, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..