To enter Nanogenmo, you have to write a program that generates a novel, then post it, along with the novel and the training data used to produce it. 500 teams’ entries have been posted to Github.
The entrants get to define “novel” however they like, so there’s some pretty weird stuff in here, like The Cover of the Sun Also Rises,” an 800,000+ word “novel” consisting of the human-readable names for each pixel on a high-rez version of the cover of “The Sun Also Rises” (it goes a little something like this: “Brass. Brass. Brass. Brass. Brass. Brass. Brass. Brass. Brass. Drab. Drab. University of California Gold. Brass. Brass. Dark tan. Dark tan. Dark tan. Brass. Raw umber. Raw umber. Coffee. Dark brown. Olive Drab #7. Seal brown. Olive Drab #7. Olive Drab #7. Bistre. Bistre. Café noir. Raw umber. University of California Gold. Brass. University of California Gold. University of California Gold. University of California Gold. Copper. University of California Gold. University of California Gold. Brass. Brass. University of California Gold.”)
Others are more successful, thanks to the clever use of constraint. The Gamebook of Dungeon Tropes produced a totally plausible high fantasy choose-your-own-adventure book: “Throughout your journey in these lands, you’ve heard subtle tales of a spreading shadow that grow more and more threatening as you get closer to the village of Nuria. The stories tell of Ir, a horrifying green dragon whose foul magic is spreading throughout the air and water and poisoning the countryside. The villagers beseech you to help fight this menace before the darkness takes its toll.”
Then there’s The X Days of Christmas, a songbook with 165 verses, such as “One hundred and sixty-one oblati in crackpottery Santas,” and “One hundred and twenty-eight acephala ventriloquizing,”
Other branches upon which I lit and flittered away some of my morning: The Cyberpunk Corporation Generator (50,000 words’ worth of same), The Book of Eliza (plausible Old Testament tedium); The Tale of the Github Repository (turning commit messages into a story); Around the World in X Wikipedia Articles (“Drifting west-to-east through clusters of Wikipedia’s geolocated articles, starting and ending at London’s Reform Club, and describing locations using fragments of the text available in each article along the way”).
For the Borges fan: Encyclopedia Of The Useless (“Chapter I: Words Of The Useless,” “Chapter II: Numbers Of The Useless,” etc).
Waiting for Gobot: Automated Twitter adaptation of Beckett.
Nanogenmo 2015 [Github]
(via /.)