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Programming AI Books Idle

Over 50 Programmers Generate 50,000-Word Novels For 9th Annual 'Nanogenmo' Event (github.com) 12

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Since 1999 fiction writers have tried starting and finishing the composition of 50,000-word novels in November for "National Novel Writing Month". But for the last nine years, programmers have instead tried generating 50,000 word novels — and this year's edition received more than 50 entries.

"The only rule is that you share at least one novel and also your source code at the end," explains the event's official page on GitHub.

From the repository's README file: The "novel" is defined however you want. It could be 50,000 repetitions of the word "meow" (and yes it's been done!). It could literally grab a random novel from Project Gutenberg. It doesn't matter, as long as it's 50k+ words.

Please try to respect copyright. We're not going to police it, as ultimately it's on your head if you want to just copy/paste a Stephen King novel or whatever, but the most useful/interesting implementations are going to be ones that don't engender lawsuits.

This year's computer-generated novels include " sunday in the sunday in the," mapping the colors from each dot in the Pointillist painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte onto words from the lyrics of a musical about that painting. ("Rush blind. Link adds shallot again....")
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Over 50 Programmers Generate 50,000-Word Novels For 9th Annual 'Nanogenmo' Event

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  • People seem to find this crap fascinating, like Pollack paintings or speaking in tongues at a church.
  • Writer here. I joined _Serious_ writer's meetup groups where the members _seriously_ talked about "NanoRimo" like it was a _serious_ thing.

    As far as I can tell, it's a joke on people who are bad at math, which is fucking everyone in the literature field.

    If you write one single publishable page a day consistently for the rest of your life you will likely be one of the world's most prolific novelists. Professional writers, such as Robert McKee, target 1000 words (4 pages) per day and take 1-2 days off per w

    • As far as I can tell, it's a joke on people who are bad at math, which is fucking everyone in the literature field.

      Don't get up yourself, it's not a good look.

      This November meme crap targets 1667 words per day with no days off. So they're encouraging people who have probably not figured out the kinks in their own writing process to work at a pace roughly 60% greater than the _target_ for professional writers, without even the minimum breaks the pros would take.

      You as a professional need to be able to hit yo

    • by waspleg ( 316038 )

      The idea is to try to establish a habit. My wife is a writer, among other things, and most of the people she has talked to who also make this claim in groups don't write.

      They talk about writing/being a writer while not actually writing anything. There are a whole lot of whirlpools of little in-groups. It took quite some time to find a small group of people who actually do, and even longer to find writers interested in her actual area of interest. See, there are subject snobs also, who look down on certa

    • This November meme crap targets 1667 words per day with no days off. So they're encouraging people who have probably not figured out the kinks in their own writing process to work at a pace roughly 60% greater than the _target_ for professional writers, without even the minimum breaks the pros would take.

      One can look at this from a different perspective, one of psychology.

      The purpose of writing a novel in 30 days is not the quality, it's the motivation. As one commenter of the practice put it, "it's easier to fix crap than air", and that one statement sums up the practice.

      Lots of people want to be writers and have a "good idea" for a book, but don't have the motivation to start, don't have the motivation to continue and finish, and spend all of their time thinking about the words and wishing that they had m

  • So if we have an infinite number of programmers generating 50000 random words on an infinite number of computers, we will eventually get the work of Shakespeare?

Keep up the good work! But please don't ask me to help.

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