Abstract
This chapter outlines a proposal for an embodied computational model of storytelling, using robots. If it could be built, the model would open the possibility for experimental demonstration and investigation of how simple narrative might emerge from interactions with the world and then be shared, as stories, with others. The core proposition of this chapter is that in such a system we would have a practical synthetic model of robot-robot storytelling. That model might then be used to experimentally explore a range of interesting questions, for example on narrative-based social learning or the relationship between the narrative self and shared narrative.
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- 1.
Here we assume a simple ontological approach to what is fictional narrative.
- 2.
Where is the meaning? It could be argued that when the listener replays the story in its IM (functional imagination) that is meaning.
- 3.
In the model set out here the context is the here and now. But of course the story could be used to create a different context for the listener, i.e., to initialize its World Model the story could begin: “Imagine you are standing by the …”
- 4.
Note that the listener’s world model will be different to the storyteller’s, since the objects and their locations in the world model are initialised by each robot’s object tracker/localiser (Fig. 4.1) as it moves through the world.
- 5.
Note also that there is no reason that same machinery couldn’t be used for the sharing of ‘historical’ narratives, rather than fictional, i.e., what actually happened to robot A, rather than what it imagines but didn’t enact.
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Acknowledgements
The title of this chapter is a quote from the late Richard Gregory. In 2006 when discussing the possibility of emergent robot culture with the author, Richard Gregory declared: “when your robots start telling each other stories, then you’ll really be onto something”. The work of this chapter is partially funded by EPSRC grant reference EP/L024861/1.
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Winfield, A.F.T. (2018). When Robots Tell Each Other Stories: The Emergence of Artificial Fiction. In: Walsh, R., Stepney, S. (eds) Narrating Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64714-2_4
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