Monday, February 16, 2009

Sentence I particularly enjoyed in Engineering & Technology Magazine

There's an interesting piece by Vitali Vitaliev in a recent issue of Engineering & Technology magazine, discussing a novel-writing program called PC Writer 1.0. The program's authors uploaded various works of Russian literature to serve as a stylistic (and, presumably, structural) base. The result is what Vitaliev calls 'a grammatially correct and free-flowing Russian-ese mongrel of a modern novel'.

It is of course gratifying if not surprising to learn that the program does pretty well on the whole, but fails to give its characters (and one would hope it's style generally) much peculiarity. The novel, True Love.wrt, is populated by characters from Anna Karenina, or at least by characters bearing their names. The following quote from Levin could have been uttered by several Tolstoy's characters and any number of Dostoyevsky's, but it hardly recalls Levin himself:

'You know what: I would have been very scared of what's to come had I not been so drunk.'

1 Comments:

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