JET writes: A writer has a response to the recent Guardian article about readers preferring happy endings in novels (referred to in this lisnews story).
Karl elaborates: Buried further down in the story is this fascinating fact:
This huge wave of derivative literature is a homage to the contagious power of fiction; soon it may be generated by the push of a button. Mathematicians at Google have invented a new algorithm (how’s that for a gripping opening line?) that will soon be able to produce perfect instant translation. Within a given context of prose, they say, it is possible to work out mathematically the most appropriate translation for every word.If computers can translate English into perfect French, then they can presumably translate English into perfect Shakespeare in the same way. Thus, in some distant future realm of literature, we may be able to feed, say, a work by Stephen King into your computer and then get the same story out, but as Shakespeare would have written it, at the other end.
The mind boggles.
The problem is…
That you need a sufficiently large base of writings, ir order to figure these things out. And they have to be accurate writings (I presume Google is using good source material – ie: not from the web). This bad grammar from fanfic and slash and other places is not going to help these algorithms. Presumably they might be able to figure out what other period pieces are enough like Shakespeare to then give a large enough base of stuff to work from, but it’s still going to be formulaic. And it won’t be the pleasure to read that a creatively forced piece would be.
— Ender, Duke_of_URL