Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Grimes’ Fairy Tales: A 1960s Story Generator

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Interactive Storytelling (ICIDS 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10690))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

We provide the first extensive account of an unknown story generator that was developed by linguist Joseph E. Grimes in the early 1960s. A pioneering system, it was the first to take a grammar-based approach and the first to operationalize Propp’s famous model. This is the opening paper in a series that will aim to reformulate the prevailing history of story generation in light of new findings we have made pertaining to several forgotten early projects. Our study here has been made possible by personal communication with the system’s creator, Grimes, and excavation of three obscure contemporaneous sources. While the accepted knowledge in our field is that the earliest story generator was Sheldon Klein’s automatic novel writer, first reported in 1971, we show that Grimes’s system and two others preceded it. In doing this, we reveal a new earliest known system. With this paper, and follow-ups to it that are in progress, we aim to provide a new account of the area of story generation that lends our community insight as to where it came from and where it should go next. We hope others will join us in this mission.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    This larger project is being conducted in collaboration with Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, so I use plural pronouns in this paper.

  2. 2.

    Unless otherwise noted, information and quotes provided in this section originate from personal communications with Joe Grimes (email correspondences dated June 1, 2017; June 19, 2017; June 27, 2017; and August 19, 2017).

  3. 3.

    For almost thirty years, she was editor of Ethnologue, the preeminent catalogue of human languages.

  4. 4.

    Father Busa’s exhaustive indexing of all the words in the works of Thomas Aquinas [9], begun in 1949, is considered the birth of the digital humanities [25].

  5. 5.

    And George Lakoff’s influential 1964 reformulation using recent developments from Chomskyan linguistics [31].

  6. 6.

    A notable exception here is saga ii, a 1960 system that we discuss in Sect. 3.

  7. 7.

    There are also interesting connections to one of the all-time major story generators, mexica [39]: both were developed in Mexico City, and while Grimes’s system aided his field study of the Huichol people, mexica’s generated stories are about the Mexica people, who are also indigenous to modern-day Mexico.

  8. 8.

    Quotes here have been translated into English by Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera.

  9. 9.

    And ordering constraints would further reduce the size of this space.

  10. 10.

    Unless otherwise noted, information and quotes about this project originate from personal communications with Bob Binnick (email correspondences dated June 23, 2017, and August 9, 2017).

  11. 11.

    Grimes’s own brief accounts in English and Spanish have never been cited.

  12. 12.

    Email correspondence dated July 13, 2017.

  13. 13.

    In our field, Lee’s 1994 master’s thesis is the earliest such work [33].

  14. 14.

    And indeed Binnick’s 1969 system does too.

  15. 15.

    The episode is available online at http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/10268-the-thinking-machine-1961---mit-centennial-film; the segment of interest begins around the 32-min mark.

  16. 16.

    Another consideration is how ‘story generation’ is defined, but we will leave that discussion for a different paper.

  17. 17.

    Story grammars did not go down without a fight [35], and their appeal in contemporary contexts is evidenced by Kate Compton’s Tracery [11].

  18. 18.

    To be clear, we are not calling for the abandonment of Proppian story generation. Rather, we mean to shed light on the origins of this approach, and in this light we find that the earliest attempts were curiously aborted. In any event, even successful entrants in this tradition should acknowledge their forebears: Grimes and Binnick.

  19. 19.

    Again, we note that Mark Sample rediscovered this system in 2013 [44].

References

  1. Exploring the fascinating world of language. Bus. Mach. XLVI(3), 10–11 (1963). Courtesy IBM Corporate Archives

    Google Scholar 

  2. Language to be discussed. Kansas State Collegian 72(60), 6, 14 December 1965

    Google Scholar 

  3. Linguist demonstrates shortcut to translating. Kansas State Collegian 72(60), 1, 14 December 1965

    Google Scholar 

  4. Linguist to explain methods. Kansas State Collegian 72(53), 4, 7 December 1965

    Google Scholar 

  5. Linguistics expert to give demonstration of methods. Kansas State Collegian 72(59), 1, 13 December 1965

    Google Scholar 

  6. Linguists demonstration Monday at Kansas State. The Manhattan (Kansas) Mercury, 1, 7 December 1965

    Google Scholar 

  7. Binnick, R.I.: An application of an extended generative semantic model of language to man-machine interaction. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 1–34 (1969)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Black, J.B., Wilensky, R.: An evaluation of story grammars. Cogn. Sci. 3(3), 213–229 (1979)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Busa, R.: The annals of humanities computing: the index thomisticus. Comput. Humanit. 14(2), 83–90 (1980)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Colby, B.N., Collier, G.A., Postal, S.K.: Comparison of themes in folktales by the general inquirer system. J. Am. Folklore 76(302), 318–323 (1963)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Compton, K., Kybartas, B., Mateas, M.: Tracery: an author-focused generative text tool. In: Schoenau-Fog, H., Bruni, L.E., Louchart, S., Baceviciute, S. (eds.) ICIDS 2015. LNCS, vol. 9445, pp. 154–161. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27036-4_14

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  12. Dundes, A.: On computers and folk tales. Western Folklore 24(3), 185–189 (1965)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Dundes, A.: Binary opposition in myth: the Propp/Lévi-Strauss debate in retrospect. Western Folklore 56(1), 39–50 (1997)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Eger, M., Potts, C.M., Barot, C., Young, R.M.: Plotter: operationalizing the master book of all plots. In: Proceedings of the Intelligent Narrative Technologies and Social Believability in Games, pp. 30–33 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Fairclough, C.: Story games and the OPIATE system. Ph.D. thesis, University of Dublin, Trinity College (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Ferri, G.: Between procedures and computer games: semiotics of practices as a unifying perspective. In: Proceedings of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, pp. 291–302. Universidade da Coruña (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Ferri, G.: Narrative structures in IDN authoring and analysis. In: Koenitz, H., Ferri, G., Haahr, M., Sezen, D., Sezen, T.İ. (eds.) Interactive Digital Narrative: History, Theory and Practice, pp. 77–90. Routledge (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Garvin, P.L.: Computer participation in linguistic research. Language 38(4), 385–389 (1962)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Gervas, P.: Computational approaches to storytelling and creativity. AI Mag. 30(3), 49 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Gervás, P.: Propp’s morphology of the folk tale as a grammar for generation. In: Proceedings of the Computational Models of Narrative, pp. 106–122 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Grimes, J.E.: La computadora en las investigaciones humanísticas. Anuario de Letras. Lingüística y Filología 5, 163–174 (1965)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Grimes, J.E.: Linguistic and anthropological projects using the computer. In: The Use of Computers in Anthropology, pp. 515–516 (1965)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Grimes, J.E., Cardona-Rivera, R.E., Ryan, J.: Translation of “La Simulación” (2017). Available upon request

    Google Scholar 

  24. Harrison, B., Riedl, M.O.: Learning from stories: using crowdsourced narratives to train virtual agents. In: Proceedings of the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 183–189 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Hockey, S.: The history of humanities computing. In: A Companion to Digital Humanities, pp. 3–19 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Klein, S.: Automatic paraphrasing in essay format. Mech. Transl. Comput. Linguist. 8(3–4), 68–83 (1965)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Klein, S., Simmons, R.F.: Syntactic dependence and the computer generation of coherent discourse. Mech. Transl. 7(2), 50–61 (1963)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Klein, S., et al.: A program for generating reports on the status and history of stochastically modifiable semantic models of arbitrary universes. University of Wisconsin Tech. Rep. TR142 (1971)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Koenitz, H., Ferri, G., Haahr, M., Sezen, D., Sezen, T.İ.: Introduction: the evolution of interactive digital narrative theory. In: Koenitz, H., Ferri, G., Haahr, M., Sezen, D., Sezen, T.İ. (eds.) Interactive Digital Narrative: History, Theory and Practice, pp. 69–76. Routledge (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Kybartas, B., Bidarra, R.: A survey on story generation techniques for authoring computational narratives. Trans. Comput. Intell. AI Games (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Lakoff, G.: Structural complexity in fairy tales. The Study of Man 1, 128–150 (1972)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Lamb, S.M., Gould, L.: Concordances from computers (1964)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Lee, M.: A model of story generation. Master’s thesis, University of Manchester, Manchester (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Lévi-Strauss, C., Weightman, J., Weightman, D.: The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology. Pimlico New York, NY (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  35. Mandler, J.M., Johnson, N.S.: On throwing out the baby with the bathwater: a reply to Black and Wilensky’s evaluation of story grammars. Cogn. Sci. 4(3), 305–312 (1980)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Meehan, J.R.: Using planning structures to generate stories. Am. J. Comput. Linguist. 33, 78–94 (1975)

    Google Scholar 

  37. Meehan, J.R.: The metanovel: Writing stories by computer. Ph.D. thesis, Yale University (1976)

    Google Scholar 

  38. Morse, H.R.: Preliminary operating notes for SAGA II. MIT Technical Memorandum 8436-M-29 (1960)

    Google Scholar 

  39. Pérez ý Pérez, R., Sharples, M.: Mexica: a computer model of a cognitive account of creative writing. J. Exp. Theoret. Artif. Intell. 13(2), 119–139 (2001)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  40. Propp, V.: Morphology of the Folktale. University of Texas Press (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  41. Riedl, M.O., Harrison, B.: Using stories to teach human values to artificial agents. In: Proceedings of the AI, Ethics, and Society, pp. 105–112 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  42. Ryan, M.L.: The heuristics of automatic story generation. Poetics 16(6), 505–534 (1987)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Sack, W.: Une machine à raconter des histoires: propp et les software studies. Les Temps Modernes 5, 216–243 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. Sample, M.: An account of randomness in literary computing (2013). Presented at Modern Language Association

    Google Scholar 

  45. Smith, J.B.: Thematic structure and complexity. Style 9, 32–54 (1975)

    Google Scholar 

  46. Summer Institute of Linguistics: First portable computer for linguistic fieldwork. https://www.sil.org/history-event/first-portable-computer-linguistic-fieldwork. Accessed 22 Jun 2017

  47. Wardrip-Fruin, N.: Expressive Processing: Digital fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. MIT Press, Cambridge (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  48. Wardrip-Fruin, N.: Digital media archaeology: interpreting computational processes. In: Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, pp. 302–322 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  49. Worthy, R.M.: A new American poet speaks: the works of A.B. Horizon. A Magazine of the Arts IV(5), 96–99 (1962)

    Google Scholar 

  50. Yngve, V.H.: Random generation of English sentences. In: Proceedings of the Machine Translation of Languages and Applied Language Analysis, pp. 66–80 (1961)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

We are deeply indebted to Joseph E. Grimes, who, over the span of two months, graciously answered numerous questions about his project. Likewise, we thank Robert I. Binnick for taking the time to respond to inquiries regarding his own pioneering system. Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera pitched in to translate Grimes’s Spanish-language account of his system—this translation proved to be a critical source. L.J. Strumpf, of the IBM Corporate Archives, furnished another major source, the Business Machines article. He also provided high-quality scans of the archival images included in this paper—these have not been seen since the photographs were taken in 1963. Finally, we would like to thank Cliff Hight, archivist at Kansas State University, who also provided assistance on the project.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Expressive Intelligence Studio, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

    James Ryan

Authors
  1. James Ryan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to James Ryan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal

    Nuno Nunes

  2. Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Ulsan, Korea (Republic of)

    Ian Oakley

  3. University of Madeira, Funchal, Portugal

    Valentina Nisi

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Ryan, J. (2017). Grimes’ Fairy Tales: A 1960s Story Generator. In: Nunes, N., Oakley, I., Nisi, V. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10690. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71027-3_8

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71027-3_8

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-71026-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-71027-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation