Why BRUTUS Fails the Lovelace Test

The BRUTUS system is designed to appear to be literarily creative to others. To put the point in the spirit of the Turing Test, BRUTUS reflects a multi-year attempt to build a system able to play the short short story game, or S³G for short (Bringsjord, 1998). (See Figure 8 for a picture of S³G.)

  

Figure 8: The Short Short Story Game, or S³G for Short.

The idea behind S³G is simple. A human and a computer compete against each other. Both receive one relatively simple sentence, say: ``As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." (Kafka 1948, p. 67) Both mind and machine must now fashion a short short story (about 500 words) designed to be truly interesting; the more literary virtue, the better. The goal in building BRUTUS, then, is to build an artificial author able to compete with first-rate human authors in S³G, much as Deep Blue went head to head with Kasparov.

How does BRUTUS fare? Relative to the goal of passing S³G, not very well. On the other hand, BRUTUS can ``author" some rather interesting stories (Bringsjord & Ferrucci, 2000). Note that we have placed the term `author' in scare quotes. Why? The reason is plain and simple, and takes us back to Lady Lovelace's objection: BRUTUS doesn't originate stories. He is capable of generating it because two humans, Bringsjord and Ferrucci, spent years figuring out how to formalize a generative capacity sufficient to produce this and other stories, and they then are able to implement part of this formalization so as to have a computer produce such prose. This method is known as reverse engineering. Obviously, with BRUTUS set to A and Bringsjord and Ferrucci set to H in the definition of LT, the result is that BRUTUS fails this test.

Let's now give you, briefly, a specific example to make this failure transparent. BRUTUS is programmed to produce stories that, are, at least to some degree, bizarre. The reason for this is that reader response research tells us that readers are engaged by bizarre material. Now, in BRUTUS, to express the bizarre, modifiers are linked with objects in frames named bizzaro_modifiers. Consider the following instance describing the bizzaro modifier bleeding.

What Bringsjord and Ferrucci call literary augmented grammars, or just a LAGs, may be augmented with constraints to stimulate bizarre images in the mind of the reader. The following LAG for action analogies,

• BizarreActionAnalogy $\rightarrow$ NP VP like ANP
• NP $\rightarrow$ noun_phrase
• ANP $\rightarrow$ modifier (isa bizzaro_modifier) noun (isa analog of NP)

in conjunction with bizzaro_modifiers, can be used by BRUTUS to generate the following sentence.

Hart's eyes were like big bleeding suns.

Sentences like this in output from BRUTUS are therefore a function of work carried out by (in this case) Ferrucci. Such sentences do not result from BRUTUS thinking on its own.